After a ten-year journey, during which the workshops and creative activities of Firenza Guidi and ELAN were housed in various places and locations, often stepping on the toes of other entities such as sports, schools or other alternative structures, the opportunity to have a home has finally presented itself: a dedicated place whose primary purpose is creativity, culture and artistic training.
The frantoio project is presented as a theatre school and permanent centre for the performing arts, conceived and structured organically rather than as a simple succession of activities. We often tend to think of the arts as distinct genres: theatre, cinema, music, visual arts, dance, opera. Our many years of experience have taught us that the arts have a profound impact on each other, influencing one another. Contamination, references and influences in artistic languages help to nurture and understand broader cultural processes. This is why elan sees frantoio as a place where different art forms come together under one roof to grow and help each other grow.
We would like to avoid turning the frantoio into a hotel booked at random for short stays and ephemeral use. Instead, we see the frantoio as a space in which to invest time, passion and talent. As a centre for participation, professional commitment and communication. A centre of activity and a school for young people from the local area and beyond, which will continue to expand at regional, national and international level to open windows onto the world. After years of nomadism, we have recognised not only the need to put down roots – because our roots are already deep in Fucecchio, like the centre of the earth – but also to have a permanent home and school that allow for stability, continuity and greater planning capacity. This is a strategic and forward-looking vision that allows for longer-term planning and consequently encourages organisers, producers and users to make an investment that goes beyond a single season and a single project. Together with our own, we have also recognised in young people (and not only in them) the need for a place of identity, of gathering and participation, of cultural exchange that is not a borrowed space, stolen, carved out of the time of other activities like older sisters.
The frantoio project aims to create a lively artistic community in contact with the world while remaining sensitive to the needs and potential of the individual. A structure that can collaborate with the municipal administration, interact with other entities in the area, promote emerging organisations and associations, and at the same time open windows onto the world. First and foremost, the frantoio Project recognises the fundamental characteristic of all the work of firenza guidi and elan: its dialectical identity: the fusion of creation and training produces collaboration between individuals and cultures. Collaboration is therefore understood as the creation of “glo-cal” communities (global and at the same time strongly localised in the territory). In this, the Project and the place are a perfect match, particularly if we take the idea of the frantoio as a methodological metaphor: a fusion between machine and olives to create oil, a substance that is impossible to produce with only olives or only the machine.
The School and training courses are born from impulses that tend towards the development of each person’s creative, artistic and professional skills. Creativity is a natural state of being, accessible to all. It is not a special gift for a select few. Creativity is what keeps us in touch with our innermost selves. It is the source that unites us all with our deepest being: stillness and silence, laughter and play. Sensuality and joy. Intuition, imagination, vision. It is the internal spring that keeps us moving, constantly evolving and changing.