by Danielle Chynoweth
Genoa rises up from the sea, a chaotic surface of bricks and stone and tangled streets holding several thousand years of memory in the arc of its harbor.
Our first stop is AutAut – a squatted space claimed by protesting students earlier this year, shortly after our discussions with them last November.
I pause here for a brief history of the student occupations and our role in it:
In 2008 the Italian Parliament signed into law Berlusconi’s plan to slash ~$8 billion Euros in funding for public education and restructure it around regressive concepts of order and authority.
As a result, over 150,000 education jobs will be cut over 3 years. University tuition will rise from $3,000 to $10,000 Euros in a country that has seen wages and saving accounts literally cut in half with the conversation from the Italian lira to the Euro.
Anyone failing a language test on the first day of school will be segregated into a different class, a move called “positive discrimination.” School uniforms and rising from one’s seat when the teacher enters, and teacher’s ability to fail students for bad behavior are also part of the legislation.
Hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and parents took to the streets, and occupied schools at all grade levels in protest.
Last November, the School for Designing a Society was invited to meet with protestors still occupying schools – at a high school in Pietrasanta and the University of Genoa.
We met teachers who wanted to design new ways of teaching. We facilitated a conversation asking “What does our education need to be if we are to participate in forming society in reference to our desires?” We met students angry at the “mafioso logic” in universities that protects a caste system still based on blood lineage. In both cases they complained of the trend of “precarious teachers,” that is, contract teachers who live contract to contract, are often fired each summer, and live on near volunteer wages.
This Spring, we were invited back, to offer a Laboratorio di R(i)esistenza (Laboratory of Resistance/Re-existence) at Aut Aut. Aut aut, (which refers to an either/or ultimatum in Latin), is an occupied space on the periphery of the University of Genoa, in a magnificent deteriorating stone building that skirts the ghetto. The neighborhood was once a mandatory place for Jews and is now a tolerated as a favorite place for local businessmen to pick up transvestite prostitutes, and as cheap living for new arrivals from Senegal and Tunisia…
Our Italian friends, who have been attending the School for a number of years as students, held 3 workshops leading up to this one on “Educating to Desire” at Aut Aut this Spring.
We are here to support our Italian friends as they develop projects that create environments of reflection for activists and social change artists. We plan to continue coming here twice a year if we can continue to scrape together the funding.
Sixteen people attended our Laboratorio, from Milan, Belgium, Bologna, and Genoa, who knew our work through other channels.
Some anticipated a presentation. Instead we provoked them to describe their interests and started shape shifting the conversation, opening up spaces for composing (not just doing) social activism.
The conversation settled in on the issue of Le Ronde, a volunteer, vigilante security force codified by recent parliamentary action, to respond to fears of immigrants and crime. The last manifestation of the Ronde was under fascist Italy, a link made clear with their adoption of the fascist uniform style and colors.
“Simply saying ‘Le Ronde’ is not yet stating a problem,” I explained “it needs to be made into a complete sentence to be a problem.”
So we took time working on formulations of the problem, such as:
- La Ronde make a visual normalization of a fascist atmosphere.
- La Ronde absorbs a section of the population that feels powerless (unemployed men) and gives them the crumbs of power over others.
- Our desires to control and be controlled have become larger than our desires to free and be free.
- Instead of taking responsibility for poverty and hatred and its effects, we push this responsibility onto the police and now Le Ronde.
Seeing that there were many angles to the problem, we then formulated responses to the various ways of framing the problem such as:
- Reclaiming public spaces and the streets with activities so that the need for security decreases.
- Dressing in mourning and haunting the Ronde as their do their rounds, following them and handing out literature about their origins under fascism.
- Organizing with the Ronde, recognizing them as powerless under or unemployed workers, to generate alternatives to the security problem.
We will return at the end of November. After visiting the site of the earthquake in L’Aquila, we are discussing whether disaster will be our theme for this year.