Milano Mediterranea will be a participatory art centre that speaks the languages of the Mediterranean, involving actively citizens of the neighborhood in cultural production and programming. MM will create a dialogue between communities, in particular citizens and artists from Diasporas through participatory artistic residencies and a city Festival. MM will involve adolescents with migrant backgrounds through new professional paths and the historical inhabitants to rebuild social cohesion.

A popular multicultural neighborhood characterized by poverty and social stigma in Milano.

Giambellino is a neighborhood that has a strong popular origin with a strong working class tradition, where public housing is a big problem together with the lack of inclusion of the strong presence of migrant communities, mostly Arabic-speaking one. The current situation is marked by a growing distance between different groups of citizens, in which the formal and informal places to practice social coexistence are increasingly reduced.
The lack of economic and cultural resources, together with the lack of an accessible cultural proposal produces a growing need for social cohesion and training spaces for adolescents, who often do not find space in the neighborhood's offer of aggregative spaces.

The first beneficiaries of the project are teenagers in the Giambellino district, with a specific focus on people with migrant background. The second beneficiaries are therefore young citizens living in Milan (18 - 30 years) interested in specific training: through social media communication and the project network dissemination on a local level, this young people will be involved in the proposal of workshops, which will be places of playful learning, meeting and linguistic and cultural exchange.
A third target of the project is the public that will participate in the public presentations of the residences and in the final festival: a neighborhood audience but also a citizen one, who will be the beneficiary but also the client of the cultural offer.

Through an open call, the MM artistic direction will choose 4 artists from the Mediterranean basin residents in Milan, together with a neighborhood committee. The professional artists will propose 2 months of professional training aimed at involving teenagers. The training will be focused on different artistic disciplines and may be made using the artists' mother tongues. A further training moment will be dedicated to light design and sound engineering to compose a team from the neighborhood. Each residence will end with a public presentation. The neighborhood committee and the artistic direction will finally co-design a festival, which will will display the productions the residencies, in dialogue with groups /projects proposed by the inhabitants.

For the Arabic-speaking adolescents of the neighborhood: through the launch of accessible training activities with a high professionalizing content, we intend to offer job opportunities and personal empowerment for groups of the population of the neighborhood marked by lack of opportunities. For the Theatre community: MM contributes to the development of new audiences, through the direct involvement of adolescents in the residences and, therefore, their families and circuits of reference in public openings and events. For the community of artists of the Mediterranean basin based in Milan: MM wants to map and get in touch with an often submerged community, which has little space to speak in the public scene, and make it the protagonist of new model of cultural production.

Through professional training courses of different artistic and technical disciplines, the artists will improve participatory creation practices, that provides a real exchange with the adolescents of the neighborhood. The artistic selection and co-design committee of the festival is instead transversal to the different communities both by age and by origin: the participatory cultural production and programming will be tools for aggregating and developing different audiences. The creation of a young and neighborhood team, the use of the languages of the native and non-native communities will become an instrument of a renewed community, where social cohesion also becomes the care of a place and the core of the cultural proposal.

MM aims to contribute to changing the narrative on migration in Europe, and specifically in Italy, which still represents "migrants" only as the object of the discourse in the public debate, and aims to make a shift from "object" to "subject", where communities of new citizens become protagonists of cultural production. MM's dream, in the long term, is the creation of a real neighborhood cultural centre, characterized by a young, Mediterranean and mixed team, rooted in its own territory but, at the same time, open to the world it welcomes.

SALARIES 29575
COMMUNICATION 6100
MANAGEMENT 24625 (PROJECT MANAGER - MANAGEMENT-ORGANIZATION-ADMINISTRATION-FUNDAISER- COMMUNITY MANAGER)
MATERIALS AND RENTS 10000
FOOD/ACCOMMODATION 800
OTHER 3900

The project is partially funded by the Milan municipality in the frame of LA SCUOLA DEI QUARTIERI - PON Città Metropolitane 2014-2020 program. The amount of this contribution is 25000 euros.

We would like to have feedback on the project idea and its implementation, starting from a critical analysis of the proposed concept and methodologies, especially regarding protocols and devices that encourage civic participation.