Press office
Camilla Rigatti
A week has just ended in which young people took centre stage at the Frantoio di Fucecchio and its artistic director, Firenza Guidi, with three projects focusing on diversity, one of which will continue until the end of April. For a month now, the Frantoio team has been working with fourth-year students from the I.P.S.I.A. ‘A. Checchi’, in the creation of CULT, a project promoted by the Department of Immigration and Interculturalism of the Municipality of Fucecchio and dedicated to second-generation young foreigners in Italy, future citizens of our country (the title, in fact, in addition to having a meaning of its own, is an abbreviation of ‘cultures’).
The CULT project involves the design, creation and production of various types of artefacts, the first of which is a blog containing photos and videos made by the students, which can be viewed by anyone at www.elanfrantoio.org/cult. The final goal will be the conception and staging of a performance of the same name, which the students of the “Checchi” school will create from scratch under the supervision of professionals from the frantoio, building the set, writing and recording the soundtrack, and developing the atmosphere and costumes. The work consists of daily sessions in which the students participate in thematic groups, with the collaboration of local artisans who make their workshops and skills available to the students. The aim is to bring together the desires, dreams and myths of the young people who animate the project, a group which, despite the heterogeneity of their characters and, above all, their geographical origins (the classes are made up of students of Albanian, Chinese, Spanish and South American nationality), has demonstrated that it possesses a common imagination, characterised by the same iconic figures of contemporary life.
Diversity met memory in AUSCHWITZ, which, in addition to the show open to the public on Saturday 17 March, was staged throughout the week in the morning, with performances open exclusively to secondary schools in the district and the DIARI project’s catch-up sessions, which were attended by classes from the “Leonardo da Vinci”, whose participation had been prevented in February by snow. The performance, written and directed by Firenza Guidi, tells the story of a group of internees in the concentration camp of the same name in Poland, and above all of the systematic dehumanisation, alienation and annihilation of identity practised by the ruthless and meticulous Nazi machine, in the name of an ideology that placed its most distressing fears in the diversity of the other. DIARI, which, in addition to the performance, offers students the opportunity to write their ideas and impressions in real time in a diary handmade by the students themselves, and AUSCHWITZ aim to provide young schoolchildren with a direct and non-notional way of learning about and engaging with history, memory and the value of interculturalism and encountering those who are different from us.
Diversity and interculturalism will be the thematic basis for the entire second half of the frantoio theatre season, until the presentation of the work of the young people involved in the CULT project on 21 April at the “I Care” Foundation in fucecchio.
Director, author and manager of Elan Frantoio, firenza guidi has been producing performances, theatre shows and films all over the world for years. Much of her work is inspired by events, memories and phenomena linked to local and universal history. Through the writer-director’s working methodology, Elan Frantoio’s activities are based on the philosophy of creating and staging new dramas: new because they are unpublished in terms of texts and scenography, or new because they offer adaptations of original classics in their interpretation, or because they belong to contemporary authors never before represented in our country.