A New Form of Practice: La Rivoluzione delle Seppie

Abstract

The paper describes the work of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie in Belmonte Calabro, where they have regenerated places and promoted new forms of community and social cohesion. The tested and implemented strategies aim to make these so-called marginal areas competitive and attractive within local and territorial systems and globally. The experimental nature of this practice is characterized by a methodology for designing and constructing placed-based interventions tailored to the territories and carried out through the involvement and protagonism of academics, students, institutions and local communities. A methodology that enhances the local skills implemented by knowledge of global stakeholders and it uses critical issues as opportunities to generate elements of innovation necessary to qualify the relaunch and the development of the area concerned. The action of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie started in Belmonte Calabro. The group acted as an agent of change and, above all, as a facilitator between the old and the new inhabitants. Not only Belmonte, but also BelMondo!

1 The BelMondo Case Study in Belmonte Calabro

(See Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Questa non è Campagna, workshop in collaboration with Cheap, Crossings 2022, Belmonte, Photo by Nicola Barbuto, July 2022.

The development that characterized industrial growth and intense urban aggregation processes in Italy during the last century generated contradictions and imbalances at a territorial and social level. In the last decades, faced with large public debt, the margins of policies aimed at great investments or welfare-type interventions have been increasingly shrinking. However, the criticality marked by the abandonment and depopulation today for these territories can be seized as an opportunity. It is not a question of soliciting new oppositions concerning those that have marked the historical events of the last century, nor of cultivating anti-urban imagery or fueling settlement dispersion, but, on the contrary, of shifting attention to the territorial organization as a whole. There is a need to imagine a territory that, thanks to the rich articulation of its settlement models, continues to hold together weak and robust areas with a dense network of increasingly intangible flows; a territory that in its entirety knows specific processes of ecological transition and redevelopment of fixed capital and the relationships of proximity. In this framework, the question arises of a new social pact that can guarantee new levels of integration and social inclusion. For this to happen, a more innovative function of public infrastructure is needed, but also a greater protagonism of the agents that on the territory can be facilitators of the processes of satisfaction of new needs and social interests (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Happy Lab, Ceramic Workshop with refugee children, Casa di BelMondo, Belmonte Calabro, Photo by Giulia Rosco, October 2023.

The La Rivoluzione delle Seppie’s practice conceived and tested intentions to go in this direction, fuelled by a strong focus on planning and implementing the imagined design. The intention is not to photograph local systems as they are now but to stimulate and prefigure a decisive transformation based on global and collective influences.

It may be helpful to point out three traits that characterize its work and to help grasp its meaning and specificity. The first is related to combining a specific radical vision and an effort of concreteness in action. This radical vision seeks to make room for itself with proposals that outline measured, tactically and concretely actionable efforts. A second important aspect is that the actions carried out decline a form of multifunctional planning, which aims with the same investment to obtain multiple benefits.

The objective is not only related to the traditional renovation of a building or a space but also to develop civic research for each step, making proposals in a collective form, combining visions of the future and concreteness of action on different levels. A third aspect is that this set of actions, developed by many hands, not only by professionals but also by scholars, students, locals and migrants from different locations, proposes to focus on a precise way of understanding a diverse approach to academic research and architectural practice (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.

Collaboration Rooms, Design by Orizzontale, Crossings 2019, Belmonte Calabro, Photo by Antonio D’Agostino, July 2019.

The main question on which La Rivoluzione delle Seppie’s work is: “How can we build our communities around places?”.

By strengthening the connection between people and places, Le Seppie’s work is based on a collaborative process through which the public sphere can be shaped to maximize shared value. With community-based participation, both local and temporary, an effective place-making process that capitalizes on the resources, inspiration, and potential of the above-mentioned heterogeneous group results in the development of the BelMondo process.

This process has generated a series of actions since 2016 that contribute to both cultural welfare development and the people’s well-being. The action started in Belmonte Calabro, South of Italy, and has progressively taken shape through the annual editions of Crossings, a series of residencies, symposia and workshops: an inter-weaving of activities that have generated a network of collaborators and constant moments of exchange between different actors for a common goal: the construction of BelMondo.

The physical place, the Casa di BelMondo, is the space where manual and artistic activities take shape, the non-physical place, BelMondo Altlas, is the virtual space where collective sessions at a distance take shape, where debates, seminars, and confrontations alternate with radio projects, experiential atlases, and communication projects. In this context, La Rivoluzione delle Seppie aims to redefine the village as a living architecture, a set of places and non-places that can accommodate new living forms and offer collectively usable hybrid spaces. This allows communities to appropriate them according to collective and social needs based on the current cultural and resource-sharing approach. A solution is not proposed but a dynamic process.

The objectives are twofold: the first is the elaboration of a diverse model of living and working collectively, as opposed to competitive living and hyper-specialized work culture; the second is the exchange of knowledge to inhabit a place temporarily but constantly so that experimental, conceptual but not ideological forms can be manifested, with a different conception of a participatory approach to public living. To achieve these objectives, Glocal Tools have been developed and deciphered: eight tools that characterize the operational approach of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie, derived precisely from the know-how accumulated so far, which defines shared values that can be adapted according to the opportunities and skills in a given socio-cultural and territorial context (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.

Baywatch movable structure part of the Market Temporary Square in Belmonte Marina, Design by Orizzontale, Crossing 2022, Belmonte Calabro, Photo by Giulia Rosco, July 2022.