by Danielle Chynoweth
Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009
We are exploring a pedagogy of desire for four days in a smoggy corner of Milan.
Upon arrival at the location where we will sleep, eat, and teach, we enter a portal emblazoned with the statement Da vicino nessuno e normale, meaning “up close, nothing is normal,” with a broken looking lightening bolt for an icon.
It is a former psychiatric hospital turned youth hostel—a fitting environment for our workshop taught by composers, activists, and clowns.
I arrive in Milan to realize I am exhausted, so I walk every day for as long as I can to chase out this strange fatigue mixed with melancholy. The grounds are outlined with an imposing cement wall. Inside the courtyard we walk across a bright carpet of ginko leaves. In addition to the hostel, there is a cafe, art museum, school, church, nursing home, agricultural teaching center, and library.
Throughout there is a scattering of public art, but each attempt seems half finished, amateurish, and disconnected from any coherent idea. One path is marked by is a steel arch which leads to a muddy path. Next to it is a dry, imitation Gaudi fountain, with mosaic gnomes that have been retrofitted into ash trays. Half-finished murals—some looking like a child’s nightmare— are painted on random parts of building walls.
I walk past what appears to be a factory building, where I hear Julie Andrews singing “a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.” A dog appears out of nowhere, barking, playing the game of frighten-the-human.
Yesterday we opened with a large event with Patch. Two hundred fifty people, mostly volunteer clowns, tumbled in the gymnasium of a former immigrant detention center for our four hour workshop, entitled “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I was asked on the day we arrived to write a variation on this traditional story. And I did, narrating it into a wire microphone as volunteers from the audience acted it out. In my version the emperor and his entourage of barking TV cameras (not hiding my reference to Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister and media mogul) is derailed by a girl who redistributes power in this attention economy with her small camcorder. Then I talked about indymedia, the need to develop parallel institutions to overgrow the existing ones, and we did an assignment on revealing hidden consequences.
Afterwards, we were whisked away to a restaurant where were were joined by the famous Italian artist and architect, Luigi Serafini, and his quiet, beautiful partner, who didn’t speak a word. Exhausted, I could barely walk out of the restaurant, when a group of clowns grabbed me and kissed me again and again on the cheeks saying how much they appreciated me, the performance. All I could say in broken Italian was “I come all the way to Italy to get kisses—and here they are” which made them slobber me again. Outside the restaurant was graffiti scrawled in English: “People Hunting Reasons.”
We have a record number of 36 participants, including a Knowledge Manager from NATO, a birthing coach, several doctors and teachers, a gestalt therapist, a banker who plays clown by night, a Professor of communications psychology, a guy who works with Save the Children, an HIV researcher, and 2 high school students.
This morning, we had lively discussions about the distinction between desire (which are not available in the current society) and preference (alternatives currently available) and ways of framing problems that require structural changes for them to be resolved.
Tomorrow I will present on distinguishing between a conflict and contradiction, and how to use contradictions as points of leverage for making a changes in a social system.
In my mind is the ongoing question of how to create a teaching environment where students are not taught facts, or fed content about problems, or invited to imitate existing designs, but rather invited to articulate their own problems and generate their own designs, and given conceptual tools to do so. I don’t know of other places that do this other than PhD programs, which exist inside feudal systems polluted by corporate money.
And so this project remains interesting to me, despite my fatigue.
Friday, November 27th
It occurred to me today: We are teaching 65 Italian clowns in an insane asylum. But the asylum has been redesigned, matching the needs and offers of those with mental illness with the needs and offers of a rotating crew of international visitors. What was once a gated asylum, where people were “normalized” through segregation and depravation, was opened to the public in 1995, allowing residents as well to come and go freely.
“We help people to trust themselves” said the founders of Hostel Olinda. ”We apply the suspension of judgement…we avoid attempts to control or infantilize.”
Five rooms of the hostel are reserved for those who are “mentally challenged.” One man with crossed eyes and a pointy head greets me in Italian-English as his head shakes back and forth. A young immigrant woman scrubs our bathroom six times in one day —she is engaged in “work therapy”, working out her anxiety on the porcelain of toilet and bidet. There is a surly woman without teeth in the cafe, who shouts at us when we confuse our order. A young female psychologist apologizes on her behalf, but I wave the apology away, saying that I like loud mouthy women. At 2 a.m., a man accidentally walks into the bedroom where Rob and I sleep in two narrow beds, our arms falling off the sides. He shakes his head and apologizes. I learn to lock the door from the inside.
Tonight was the night I fell in love with our students. It always happens, even during workshops like this one when I am folded up into myself and resistant. The Italians make it easy. They pour their hearts all over you until you relent. They cooked a magnificent meal for us while I showed several folks how to drum 2 against 3 and 3 against 4. We played ukulele, clowned, and flew paper airplanes over the dining table.
Saturday, November 28th
Today, Mark introduces the concept of Non Sequitur, saying “When you have described a problem as a contradiction—the strongest articulation of a problem—that is a time for experimentation with non sequitur, to interrupt the logic of the problem.”
Then, he interrupts himself to play Sonata Quijada, a music composition he wrote 20 years ago with a jack-in-the-box, chattering teeth, dice, chimes, clothes pins, clicker, and rattle. This is perhaps the 12th time I have heard it, and I hear parts of it for the first time.
I hear that the beginning, which is a strange mixture of predictable yet surprising actions and suppression of sounds, functions to prepare the audience to hear the text at the end. The text, which Mark valiantly translated into Italian, describes the US-aided propaganda campaign against Allende’s government in Chile.
Susan ends the session with “Formulation is social work.”
Monday, November 30th—Venice
10 years ago today, I was pissing my pants on the soaked streets of Seattle helping to bar delegates from getting into the World Trade Organization meetings. I watched the same cops who escorted us during our protest against the Gap the day before, beat kids with huge sticks manufactured especially for this protest. I saw police throw can after can of tear gas at us, and kids with large mitts throw them back in defense. I saw a police pull a gas mask off the face of one kid, pepper spray their face, and then let the gas mask snap back into place, in an attempt to break their will to stay.
That day, I walked into the first Indymedia center, buzzing with possibility. I watched thousands of people, broken up into affinity groups, make decisions by consensus via empowered spokespeople and fascinating, decentralized group communication.
Today, I am wandering the streets of Venice—a city without cars, full of art everywhere. A city where the water rises each day and, the foundation which is perched on pillars, sinks into the sea, threatening to engulf traces of thousands of years of human habitation in a murky green water. Venice smells like fish and dust, flowers and incense, underwear and chocolate and fresh bread.
We stay in a hostel overlooking a piazza, where we can throw the windows open and smell and hear everything below.
I will live here for a month some day soon. To learn Italian, think, and write. Every part of the city calls for you to make something, and my wanting self wants to respond.
Wednesday, December 2nd
We return to Milan early, so that Cristina and I can talk about motherhood and to encourage her to continue formulating on the concepts of translation and “transistence”—the act of translating to resist. She is a professional translator for Patch, Fiat, the U.N. I invite her to come present at the summer school.
Meanwhile, Carol and Mark present in Darren’s English conversation class. Carol gives the assignment: tell us a autobiographical story that is linked to a part of history. The students struggle with this—not with the English, but with the linking part.
In every part of the world, people don’t know how to understand themselves in relation to the structure and dynamics of the systems they inhabit. At some point during the workshop earlier this week, Susan challenged participants: Who here can tell me the premises of the system they live under every day? Is prejudice a premise of the system or a consequence? Reformers keep the premises and try to change the consequences of a system. They respond to conflict by generating more preferences to choose from within the the current system.
Thursday, December 3rd
On the plane ride from Milan, the Italians transform the plane into a loud and lively cafe. They cluster throughout the plane in 2s and 3s and 4s, strangers meeting each other for the first time, their faces open wide to each other, telling stories with animated faces and hands. What I am witnessing is a social impossibility in the US. What about Italian history and culture makes this possible? Is it the consequence of the tradition of two long and social meals each day? If you spend that much time together, you need to learn how to stay interesting to others…learn the art of performance and story telling. Or is it a culture of intense solidarity—or, one might also say having witnessed Italian sentiments around immigration, exclusionary cultural identity? Maybe its a consequence of being a small language group in a large world?
I see demonstrated on this plane why we are successful in having a School for Designing a Society in Italy each year.