Marzia Dalfini, Maddalena Fragnito, Sara Leghissa The school reopened after a snowfall. Pandemic, class and strategic inefficiency

FAROUT
A person standing in a street next to a wall with white posters

A story about the long months in which the schools remained closed and an inquest on the health of the schools and of those bodies which cross it everyday.  

If the human voices that make up this story are many and varied, its incipit is instead to be attributed to a virus, to a non-human entity that in the pandemic months seems to have whispered advice in our ear: the dismantling of the public service it does nothing but separate the school from its function of social, political, territorial garrison, reducing the guarantee of free time to learn to think and understand, before the injunction to produce condemns it. After all, as Lucio of the Barbiana school said, “school will always be better than shit.” So, the story that we have decided to tell begins with a non-human whisper that intertwines with the words of the students met along the way. 

The school has reopened as it was born after a snowfall within the assemblies organized with the reopening of schools at the end of the Covid-19 emergency, to give a voice to students who hardly had space to speak during the pandemic period. 

Continuing her practice of visual self-investigation, Sara Leghissa, in complicity with Marzia Dalfini and Maddalena Fragnito, met students from different schools, opening up spaces for listening and discussion from which posters posted in some cities and accomplice spaces were produced. around Italy. If the 2021 publication Will you marry me? was designed as a tool of action connected to this practice, this new book is rather a tool for reflection: a story of the long months in which schools have been closed and an investigation into the state of health of the school itself and of the bodies that each day they cross it. 

Maddalena Fragnito’s text returns the chorus of reflections that emerged in the meetings with the students by incorporating their voices and investigating issues such as the relationship between technologies and the body, psychophysical health, the school evaluation system, occupations and the return to school after emergency, the repression that minors suffered as soon as they left home. In response to the strategic indifference of a country experiencing the progressive dismantling of public schools and public services in general, The school has reopened as after a snowfall is a claim to the possibility of imagining a different school from within, «in a political, social and ecological more joyful and combative than the material representation of the ruin of the public education system, of the end-of-the-world aesthetics and politics that are pervading everywhere by now». 

 

Bio

Sara Leghissa is an independent artist based in Milan. Her practice takes place mainly in the public space, through a principle of resource ecology, which uses as much as possible what is ‘already’ available in reality. You create systems and devices that try to blend in and blend in with the context, to convey images and content and to meet and intercept different audiences, through the use of accessible technologies linked to the ordinary. She was co-founder of the art project Strasse. You have collaborated and collaborated with various artists3 and collectives. You have presented your work in Italian and international contexts and festivals. Co-organizes for the Italian scene Nobodys Business, an independent platform for the exchange of practices in the performing art, NESSUNO, a place in which to generate community and resistance through the practice of the party, and Una Sauna, a wooden room that contains the instrumentation for obtaining dry air at a high temperature, which becomes an expedient for meeting and building collective practices. 

Maddalena Fragnito is a militant feminist researcher who works at the intersection between the arts, the politics of care and social movements. In Milan you co-founded MACAO (2012/22), an autonomous cultural center and Soprasotto (2013), a “pirate” nest self-managed by the neighbourhood. She is part of the research groups PirateCare (2019), OBOT (2020) and Institute of Radical Imagination (2021). The latest publication is Ecology of Care: Transfeminist Perspectives (Orthotes, 2021), co-edited with Miriam Tola. She is currently a PhD candidate at Coventry University’s Center for Postdigital Cultures. 

Marzia Dalfini deals with graphics, scenography and artistic pedagogy. You collaborate with artists, performers and festivals taking care of the graphic and scenographic process. You participate in the development and implementation of social art projects with independent organizations. She carries out art workshops for children with particular attention to active pedagogy. 

Credits

With the contribution of
Collettivo CHe del Liceo Scientifico Vittorini, Milano

Collettivo del Liceo Ginnasio Statale Virgilio, Roma

Collettivo Mille Papaveri Rossi del Liceo Carducci, Milano

Coordinamento studenti degli istituti AFAM Calliope, Milano

Istituto Statale d’Istruzione Superiore Gramsci–Keynes, Prato

Istituto Tecnico Statale a Ordinamento Speciale Albe Steiner, Torino

Liceo Artistico Statale G. C. Argan, Roma

Liceo Classico Giacomo Leopardi, Recanati

Liceo Delle Scienze Umane Stella Maris, Civitanova Marche

Liceo Scientifico Statale Augusto Righi, Roma

Liceo Statale Chiabrera Martini, Savona

Scuola Secondaria Statale di I grado Busoni–Vanghetti, Empoli

Unione degli Studenti Milano

E dell3 studenti Tommaso Fogli, Zoe Di Giorgio, Alice Prati, Tess e Ludovico Ottolina

  • Duration 90'
  • Doors opening at 15' before the start

    • FREE ENTRANCE until tickets run out

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