Together with the young directors and playwrights attending the last year at the Civic Theatre School Paolo Grassi in Milano, we have been inside Giambellino district for about a month, located in Lorenteggio Market, which is both a closed square, as well as a community service center.
Together, we visited yards, streets, shops, and markets in order to interview migrants about their “wished home”. Not that of origin, not even what they possess now here in Italy.
One month to imagine, in a neighborhood where housing is a central need and often problematic for its inhabitants. One month to allow us to do it together, with the awareness that even the simple imagination is hard inside suburban contexts.
The neighborhood initially rejected us but afterwards slowly showed us its many sides in which we could enter thanks to the territorial operators of the Dynamoscopio Association and the tenacity of the working group.
Gates, doors and windows have been opened. Through the survey, the inhabitants have generously spoke to us showing part of their lives. We have possibly imagined these “houses” and the neighborhood that can accommodate them: a place with lots of nature and plenty of meeting spaces to facilitate relationships between neighbors.
The neighborhood finally adopted us; each of us has now there significant affective relationships.
Lorenteggio Market also hosted the result of the interviews as well as the mise en éspace of the texts written by the playwrights starting on the basis of their own experience.
In the first evening, the installation “Fessure” allowed visitors to see the sketches of the homes they wanted and to hear respondents’ voices about the desire for private and public space and on how to overcome the challenge of a not only peaceful, but also possibly happy, coexistence. Installation plants were returned to neighborhood residents who had collaborated with us.
Teatro al Mercato – Theatre at the Market has generated a total transformation of the usual commercial space into a set that has hosted various performances, exiting the people who haunt it: they have seen and perceived the Market in a different way, i.e. culturally dense.
The three rounds of performances supervised by Manuel Renga have opened with a video on Domenico Onorato’s project to continue with Voices from the Lost City by Riccardo Tabilio and Elisa Campisi directed by Claudia Corona, Stabile / Instabile by Matteo Caniglia directed by Virginia Landi, Afantasia designed by Virginia Landi, Giorgia Aimeri and Matteo Caniglia, and A story by Giambellino from an interview with a resident of the neighborhood project by Riccardo Favaro, Tatjana Motta, Giovanni Ortoleva and Ida Treggiari, that were all sold out.
Theater at the Market has involved the public in creating a picture of the desired neighborhood witnessing the importance for people to feel “protagonist” on the theme of doing home.