Art, youths, future, rebirth, tourism, urban regeneration: the Municipality of Candelo and Fondazione Pistoletto are working to engage Candelo’s citizens inviting them to express their opinions, needs and proposals on the Ricetto and, in particular, to imagine what use to make of the Belvedere square inside the medieval fortification. The Belvedere project encourages the community to actively contribute to the design choices for that specific space. Everyone is welcome: those who join will be interviewed and will participate in group activities, during which everyone’s needs will emerge and a debate will ensue in order to incite a collective decision giving value to all proposals. The project for the new Belvedere is currently in draft form, but will soon turn into participatory design, thus generating a network of people who feel involved over time.

With this in mind, a ‘steering committee’ has been set up, of which the Municipality of Candelo and Cittadellarte are members. Work is in fact under way to create as large a group of interested parties as possible, including not only the town’s associations, but also traders, artists, cellar and restaurant owners, to name but a few. A sharing table has been reserved for municipal councillors, as a further opportunity for exchange and (also political) participation in this project, which forms part of the strategies of the Candelo of tomorrow.

With a view to shining the limelight on those who will actually ‘inhabit’ the future, the Belvedere project will give a voice to the younger people from the territory. To do so, Fondazione Pistoletto will propose (D)estructura, a workshop addressed particularly to secondary school students scheduled at Cittadellarte on Thursday 19 May from 3 to 5 pm. The workshop is free and open to spontaneous participation, and is designed to network the desires and proposals of the new generations in relation to their territory, not only in reference to the context of Candelo. “If we are talking about the future,” said Tancredi Pino, Biella’s Demopractic Work, and Alessandra Bury, Cittadellarte’s Learning Environments Office, “it is interesting to involve its protagonists, i.e. young people. How do we ask young people what kind of future they would like in an area as specific as Candelo? You can’t. So we will curate a moment of discussion that can outline an abstract and ideal perspective of the future. (D)estructura, which basically serves as a visual tool to collect data from the observation of dynamics occurring during play, can be adapted for our need, that is, a workshop activity declined according to the lens of the vision of the future”.

The workshop, which will be organised with the tutorship of Cittadellarte, will, for example, have the participants identify the spaces where they spend a lot of time in an urban context and, once they have selected them, reflect on how they can be optimised. “Starting from these spaces,” they added, “a reflection is triggered with respect to the elements that work or do not work. We can then try to define a potential improvement for the whole area. For example, if my bus stop is poorly lit, the lighting element will be important in my urban context. So, cases like this then become the values that we will use during the game to define a priority scale. This way,” they concluded, “we will have an overall view and each participant will be able to imagine and understand how to operate in favour of their city”.

You can register for the workshop by writing to t.pino@cittadellarte.it.