Guests: Demanding The Impossible

It has been superb to host Demanding The Impossible at La Foresta, who during a two week research trip in Italy met initiatives that reimagine and reinvent the ways creativity and art can generate new models of political participation, urban and rural revitalization.

The residency was undertaken by a group of 5 artists who work together as a collective across different EU nations, while also being part of art and activism collectives in each country. The artists where Croatian (but living in Sweden), French, German, Polish (but living in Germany) and English. During their visit to Italy they met with the network of La Foresta – Accademia di comunità, both in the region of Trentino and in Naples, in order to discuss and explore contemporary creative practice with people who engage in reconfiguring the politics of social and environmental issues. The goal of the residency was to spend time on research, exchange experiences, learn from each other and carry practices of creativity and grassroots politics further into our own localities and transnationally.

While in Naples, the artists spent time with the activists of Ex-Asilo Filangieri, an emerging commons in the heart of the city, where art workers and legal scholars experiment with how to carve out spaces for transformative practice in a former asylum for orphans. While in Trentino, the artists met with La Foresta, Brave New Alps, Forest Paola and comun’Orto, all of whom try to create infrastructures of commoning in the Alps. They also were invited onto hikes onto the Altissimo mountain and into the forests surrounding the town of Rovereto during which the focus was on experiencing and discussing non-human life forms that make this alpine region special.

 
Thanks to the artists Nat Skoczylas, Salome Burstein, Alen Ksoll, Margherita Huntley, Sina Ribak and Jamie Allen for the inspiring conversations about more-than-human agency and multispecies relations.
 
Their visit has been supported by the i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme, which is implemented, on behalf of the European Commission, by a consortium of organisations that have been pioneers of European cultural mobility programmes themselves. Coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), the i-Portunus Houses consortium involves MitOst (Berlin) as main mobility implementer and the Kultura Nova Foundation (Zagreb) as lead in evaluation and analysis.