Which kind of stories and worlds lie behind the streets of Don Bosco?

Sense of place

Isolde Vadala

Student

Academic staff

Sense of place wishes to open up, be personalized, be inhabited, and to contrast the sense of displacement and not belonging.

This might suggest that is imperative to rethink the narrative of the usual spaces. The lack of semantic values decrease the chance to feel included in the public dynamics, prolonging a fracture inside the community. For this reason, an approachable system should take into consideration the possibility of engaging new ways of interaction and storytelling with the use of familiar associations.

Each map represents a point of view of Don Bosco, enriched by personal references with the aim of narrating a different perspective of the neighborhood. Every place is the result of initiatives and forces starting from the individual to the community level. Never showing the same perspective. The message is to stimulate feelings. How? Seeing the living space with the curious eyes of the tourist, the vigorous ones of the actor and then, the productive ones of the builder.

Each corner has a story hidden in the way the neighborhood is organized, managed, and arranged. Where time marks the days and seasons, giving them a meaning it can not be possible to divide the place from the lives inhabiting it.

But how is the new youth of Don Bosco feeling?

What does it mean to live in the neighborhood now?

How can they express their sense of belonging?

The work should start creating new meanings, allowing each gaze to create its own microcosm while erasing barriers.

setting the workshop platform

The work started in collaboration with COOLTour. The format required to work directly on a long fabric bobbin, with each person creating an emotional map. The main point was to rediscover their interconnection with Don Bosco while acting directly on the material. However, it happened at certain moments to question how much they knew about every piece of the neighborhood and the answer was not always a positive one. The activity had the power to challenge even the certainities that were taken for granted.

Working on a long and continuous fabric has strengthened the idea of community, providing everyone with the same starting elements. The language is simple and clear, easily applicable to any possible topic that the community is willing to deepen. Because of its large length, the fabric can be modularized for multiple purposes.

It would be like imagining traveling inside an atlas, exactly like the one used by Marco Polo during his travels in the land of the Tatars. Destinations are born from the presence of several distinctive elements, describing their past, present, and future history. It takes the form of a catalog of emblems, which "once seen cannot be forgotten or confused". In many cases condensed stories and diagrams of destinies are twisted together: "perceptions tied to memories, dreams, harbingers, omens"(1).

"But the thing I wanted to warn you about is another: that all future Berenicis are already present at this moment, wrapped in each other, squeezed together"(2).

There is nothing left but to set the narrative voice as open to wonder as possible, in order to capture all the nuances.