This project was realized by Kim Kaborda and I during a Design Residency with Brave New Alps (BNA) in Winter 2020/21. Kim and I met in Rovereto as residents. The residency is part of BNAs project La Foresta - Accademia di communità, an open network of associations, informal groups and citizens, whose goals are open-access community spaces, collective experimentation and participatory learning(1) in the rural area of Rovereto and Vallagarina. They want to activate the area and its citizens to partake in designing a community economy that is accessible to everyone, sustainable and responsible.
During the residency, our initial plan was to design a workshop program, tailored to the area, we were currently living in to explore, learn and get to know this territory(2) and our place within it with different local groups. However, due to the nationwide lockdown in Italy, we had to restructure the project. This involuntary step into the non-personal sphere turned out to bring the opportunity to think bigger. Initially, we had a very local, taylored approach. We found a way to build workshops that worked on a global scale but allowed the participants to discover their own region.
For the project “Attention Recalibration” we designed several workshop scenarios to train the senses with the help of aesthetic research methods(3) and the more-than-human-societies surrounding us. They will be published to serve as a starting point for self-organized collaborative work and learning.
Each workshop focuses on a specific way to observe unknown or familiar terrain or even the unknown within familiar terrain. Through different techniques of observation, regional distinctions are embraced and embodied. The workshops help the participants to reclaim the public space for imagination and collective learning. Each exercise is followed by joint discussions that transfer the generated situated knowledge into the group. Participants will share their findings and impressions and reflect on their approach together. Groups can then collect their work in a zine together to remember their experience by and to share it with others.
Although the contents of the workshops do not build on each other, we classified them into five didactically sequential modes of exploration.
(1) Check out their projects Forno Vagabondo, Commmunità Frizzante, Commun'Orto and others!
(2) We were situated in the beautiful Trentino, the region combines the alpine character of the mountains with the mediterranean character of Lake Garda. It also has many small, isolated villages and apple and wine monoculture.
(3) This term is hard to grasp and is often an empty word. We still like it in this instance because it conveys that it is a "different", non-scientific form of research that utilizes a more subjective and emotional approach to surveying the terretory.
