The second edition of Melbourne’s Rebirth Forum, entitled From Manifestation to ManifestAction, has concluded. The participation of some of the schools from the Victoria state particularly engaged in curricula linked to art and sustainability has made it a great success: students, teachers and a few headmasters have welcomed with great enthusiasm and conviction the narrative of the Third Paradise and the methodology of the prototype of social design developed by Cittadellarte through the laboratory of the art of demopraxy with its forums and working sites. Some schools have declared their intention to pursue the process of implementation of sustainable practices through the work groups method and, most importantly, to give the participating students the opportunity to start activities within the schools in which the proposals, ideas and actions discussed in the forum can be activated.
The two days of the forum were dedicated to the creative practice of storytelling, as the premise for an actual activation of practices to get to the action, i.e. building a strategy, a vision and a narrative. Storytelling can be compared to an expository and expressive artistic practice, i.e. a manifestation: the extremely appropriate title for these two days of work, From Manifestation to ManifestAction, can therefore be concretely translated with ‘From storytelling to manifestaction’.
Independent Schools Victoria, Melbourne’s Rebirth / Third Paradise embassy, has once again supported with great conviction the methodology of the demopractic forum, which has involved Project Zero’s LILA from Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Scotland-based organization Strategy Story.
The forum has therefore not only included the application of creative strategies through the art of narration, i.e. the storytelling, but also the creation of placards (therefore the ‘manifestation’). Realized on canvas, they were carried in a procession across Melbourne’s city centre, ending in a performance of the sign-symbol of the Third Paradise. And it is through these placards that the participants in the forum have expressed their vision and their intention of action to take back to their own schools.
The programme Cittadellarte has been developing in collaboration with the youths’ movement FridaysForFuture Biella and the students’ organizations it has been working with for years has taken the shape of one of my proposals: under the motto ‘from manifestation to manifestaction’, an action was built in which students from a few Biellese schools, together with Cittadellarte’s offices, created placards. These were taken in procession and then placed horizontally to form work tables around which to meet and discuss about what to do in order to take action.
This proposal was welcomed by the 2nd edition of the Melbourne Rebirth Forum as a work strategy. In view of this, we held a public performance of great visual and aesthetic impact on the way to Federation Square (Melbourne’s central square) and along the river Yarra.
The journey will continue in the next few days with meetings at Melbourne’s Italian Institute of Culture and at Melbourne University, and with a visit to one of the most innovative schools in the region, which will present its activities linked to sustainability and environmental engagement as educational strategy through the students’ direct commitment to ecologically impacting practices.
Picture gallery of the second day of the Rebirth Forum
