The “Outer Space Treaty” ratified in 1967 by 91 countries defines the Moon as part of the common heritage of mankind, a place where weapons are banned, as well as any form of national territorial claims or private property. Seen from this perspective, the Moon is the largest public space within the Earth’s gravitational field. This is the background of the activity of Fabrizio Boni and Giorgio de Finis, anthropologists and filmmakers, who have been involved for years in the documentation and narration of the habitat emergencies of contemporary cities: to build a Moon rocket together with the inhabitants of Metropoliz, the former Fiorucci packed meats factory on Via Prenestina in Rome, home to about 200 people, including migrants and temporary workers from different areas (Italians, South Americans, North Africans, Roma people from Romania).
On Monday 16 June the Draftsmen’s Congress will welcome the participation of a delegation of children and mothers from Metropoliz who have been invited to tell the story, through drawings, of the construction of the rocket, the contribution to the shared creativity workshops held during the course of 2011 in the former factory. They will narrate how they prepared for the trip to the Moon, and what they did to get ready for such an extraordinary event.
The illustrators of Studio Pilar have the task of translating and portraying, in drawings and paintings, the stories of the direct witnesses and active protagonists of Space Metropoliz.
The illustrators will also help the participants to draw their stories and their fantasies, based on their own cultural background and language. Metropoliz and the Swiss Institute, thanks to the Draftsmen’s Congress, will momentarily join forces, united by the same lunar utopia to encourage artistic practices and ways of living in which sharing is a vital question.
Following the circular nature of the story, the inhabitants of Metropoliz, the illustrators of Studio Pilar, the authors and the curator, together with members of the Institute itself and interested visitors, will accompany the mothers and children on their trip back home; reciprocating the hospitality of the Swiss Institute will mean showing the visitors the occupied spaces, the diffused picture gallery of the MAAM (Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz_hybrid city) and sitting down together for a dinner under the discreet gaze of the Moon.
Drawing and the fantasy narrative will thus become the tools of activation of thinking about integration and communication between communities and cultural realities that are distant from one another, beyond the dynamics and urgencies of everyday life.
Space Metropoliz is a documentary film and public art project created by Giorgio de Finis and Fabrizio Boni, and curated by Silvia Litardi. The device of the “cinema worksite”, a true Trojan horse, attempts to provide a channel of expression for those men and women who on 27 March 2009 broke through the gates of the abandoned factory and decided to fight together for the right to housing and for a different, multicultural, self-managed city of solidarity. But above all, thanks to play and imagination, the project has made it possible to listen to these people’s dreams, all too often suffocated by the needs of life and the urgency of everyday difficulties. To promote the sharing of the creative process that is the basis of this intentionally “hybrid” project, workshops, encounters and seminars have been organized, including the cycle “Everyone on the Moon”, done in collaboration with Stalker and the Laboratorio di Arti Civiche, the interdisciplinary research group founded by Francesco Careri inside the Department of Urban Studies (School of Architecture – Università degli Studi Roma Tre), which concentrates on research and projects about informal settlements and occupation of structures for shelter in Rome, and on themes like intercultural living, the housing emergency, self-construction, re-creation and reappropriation of public spaces.
The whole process, the design of the rocket and the sets and their effective construction, together with the stories of Metropoliz and the interventions of the many artists that have participated in the project (including Cesare Pietroiusti, Gian Maria Tosatti, Guendalina Salini, Angelo Bellobono, Antonello Viola, Sten & Lex, Lucamaleonte, Hogre, Paolo Assenza), will form the skeleton of the documentary film that will culminate in a cinema d’essai epilogue: a true remake of the film by Méliès, Voyage dans la Lune, in which the Metropolizians board the rocket and leave the Earth to finally reach the Moon and enjoy their new-found freedom. The final goal of the film and the project is not just the successful conclusion of the whole affair (which is just as ambitious as a trip to the Moon itself) but also to contribute to achieve the community project that drives Metropoliz, bringing the Moon to the Earth.
www.spacemetropoliz.com
Studio Pilar is a creative studio that works in the areas of illustration, graphics and animation. It is composed of seven young people who met while studying for their degrees in Illustration and Animation at the European Design Institute. The idea of forming a studio came from the desire to continue after graduation with the exchange of ideas and opinions in order to create something new and original. The studio makes it possible to bring together different experiences and abilities, to develop complex projects together that would be impossible to complete on an individual basis.
The members of Studio Pilar are: Andrea Mongia, Giulio Castagnaro, Andrea Chronopoulos, Fabrizio des Dorides, Ilaria Palleschi, Sara Cariolato and Giulia Tomai. Every member of the studio has a precise style, different from the others, ranging from comics to illustration for children, painting to graphic design.
studiopilar.tumblr.com
