What kind of democracy can a residence foster? How do we learn to live together? DESIRESIDE sparks dialogue and collective imagination to explore these vital questions.
This refers to the idea of accessibility as a practice; hence, not as a static programme in which figures bring evidence, but as a constant and continuous exercise, made of efforts, that must be made by those who embody power and institution. That is, by those who have always been normalised or normed by assumptions and the official narrative. It is quite a painful exercise like learning a new language that again makes it necessary to reformulate everything one knew. From this painful exercise on the need to break habits and assumptions, one issue is fundamental: how do we get there?
An important element here is the openness to the need for a dialogue with the pedagogical universe, registering the need for new pedagogical modes, less Cartesian and Enlightenment, and including the possibility of learning new languages.
A central theme, then, is that of power. What action can we also begin to take in signalling or in opening up available spaces to those who are not yet there? A particularly evocative image is that of the shortcut. Anthropologically we tend to repeat the things we know or find the shortest and easiest way to get there. The practice of opening power to other voices and figures involves dismantling a habit and welcoming what we do not see and do not know. This plurality is what lies in the essence of accessibility as a form of democracy.
The desire is to arrive at institutions that are deconstructed or assume other postures through probably three fundamental axes:
- Working on the structural impact of organisations, thus seeing accessibility not as a problem of those who are not there but as a problem of those who have the space and power;
- The facilitation of spaces of mixing: opening up spaces of proximity and complicity between different instances, bodies and communities, and thus also stemming the segregation of spheres of power but also of communities
- The diversification of leadership as a possibility of impact also on imaginaries from an aesthetic perspective. This intercepts the theme of the canon: to which aesthetics we allow to exist on stages or public places, because that transforms the imaginary and also helps us a little to return to the discourse of education.
A question that intercepts all the themes that have been dealt with is connected to desire and the figure, from the classical world, of the desiderantes. The question is: who are we waiting for and what do we want to see coming that is not yet there?