How will you act?
The arrival of Covid-19 has not only created a sense of emptiness, doubt and suspension, it’s now leading us towards an incomprehensible phase of re-elaboration of our daily habits.
We are going back to living among people and things.
The way we will manage our thoughts and actions will be decisive to the definition of a new balance: what type of society do we want to build during and the after the Coronavirus? and from what type of reality are we projecting our vision?

To answer the question about ‘how I will act’, I’d therefore rather paint a practical picture.
I’ve resumed my activity with the OP Collective on producing the work #OP2020 Uno Di Un Milione, suspended during the pandemic emergency, whose debut has been postponed to 22nd March 2021, World Water Day.
Talking about a relational work these days in age – when every type of relationship is made more complicated if not in its form supported by technology – can seem a bit random: it’s obvious that the Covid-19 experience has modified all our behaviours and interactions, and it is on this very transformation that Uno Di Un Milione is centred, i.e. on how we will be able to rebuild the dimension of real community.

After many months of planning, production had started on 1st January 2020 in Val di Sole, Trentino, where we conducted workshops and composition classes with music schools, centres of social aggregation, treble voice choirs, and bands. On 2nd February we eventually took the project to the ice theatre Ice Dome, built at the Tonale pass, where we finished composing the rising theme of Uno Di Un Milione using incredible ice instruments and performed it in its initial form with the treble voice choir of the Celestino Eccher Music School and the youths of the Appm centre.
The work was then symphonically orchestrated by maestro Silvio Morais D’Amico, and in October it will be performed and recorded by the symphony orchestra and the treble voice choir of the La Scala Academy at the Abanella Theatre in Milan, where we have been called to devise new modalities of recording since it won’t probably be appropriate to gather 75 musicians and 40 singers, in addition to the technicians, in the same place.

Once the track is recorded, the symphony will be revealed gradually, letting each person listen to one note at a time and take part in a huge shared mosaic; each revealed note will be connected to the discovery of the countless springs of Val di Sole, under the guidance of the innovative technology of Popack.art, and through the use of a special Uno Di Un Milione water bottle that will direct it.
The water bottle will in fact constitute the symbolic compass that will geolocalise the sounds, the springs, the events and the initiatives to find through a QR Code installed on it, tracing a path that will lead to Pejo 3000. On this mountaintop, we are creating a sculpture installation by MOG Morgana Orsetta Ghini, which will emphasise the dreamlike imaginary of these unique landscapes, connecting world travellers and residential communities to the themes proposed by science that will be debated along the whole valley, in coordination with study initiatives, analysis and researches by tsm Trentino School of Management and MUSE Trento’s Science Museum. And only here the participants will be able to listen to the whole symphony in its integral and majestic version.

Water is the foundational theme of the project #OP2020 Uno Di Un Milione, which Val di Sole’s Tourist Office, the City of Peio, Pejo3000, the Stelvio National Park and the Autonomous Province of Trento support in its multiple declinations, focusing on it over a twenty-year long perspective, towards a radical reconsideration of our approach to the territory and the resources of the valley.

We think it’s interesting to mention that as of 14th November 2019 Pejo3000 has become the first plastic-free ski resort in the world as a response to the shocking study by University of Milan and University of Milano-Bicocca according to which in the Forni Glacier (in higher Valtellina) there are between 131 and 162 million particles of plastic components, a comparable rate to the European seas. We are boosting a vision of reconversion that the whole Val di Sole is supporting and to which our perspective fully adheres.

The distance between ‘one’ and ‘a million’ defines the difference of impact between a solo and a collective initiative. The single individual is fundamental inasmuch as they are part of a collectivity. To aggregate a million informed individuals is the objective of Uno Di Un Milione, with the aim of giving priority to a new theme, the environment we live in, too often considered an immaterial and irrelevant entity, like art and culture, which need to regain centrality instead, for their ability to generate cautiousness, participation, proposition, vision to the future and, today like never before, a break with obviously inadequate schemes.
Water is therefore the fundamental element on which we are building the whole narrative, and we think it’s important to highlight a precise analogy: we believe that the human being should aim at the same depth reached by water – the element that seeps further deep than any other – in order to be able to find the instruments to respond to the events we are going through, accepting the fact that we will need to envision this in a twenty-year-long perspective at least, hence the meaning of OP2020.

I’m keen to mention that during the full pandemic emergency and the total lockdown, we thought it made sense to dedicate the platform unodiunmilione.com to an initiative supporting Trentino’s elderlies and assisted living structures that saw the children of the treble voice choir of the Celestino Eccher Music School as protagonists, clearly focusing on a sense of community cohesion.

The picture I have described is but a piece of the puzzle of what we believe it’s important to plan and tangibly activate, through a process that leads us towards a ‘leap of the species’ from delusional to informed subjects, if we really want to talk about a reconversion of our productive, cultural and social systems, and consider it our priority. I can only imagine how many connections can be triggered by actions like this one, even if initially isolated, which find a way to converge into a mapping of concrete experiences, without forgetting about a specific aspect of this process we deem decisive: quoting the architect Carlo Ratti, the weak links rising from the fortuitousness of our encounters are very important, without activating them we would risk confining ourselves in a bubble that polarises our ideas, ending up dealing only with who we know. Since the beginning of the lockdown, people have been interacting mainly online, the weak links are wearing thin and social networks are therefore more fragile and don’t work as well anymore.
People we meet by chance can expose us to a condition we hadn’t foreseen, precisely because they are not linked to our network. And this boosts our creativity and widens our horizons.

It is therefore important to reactivate a collective sharing able to lead to these productive encounters, possibly managed through workshops organised according to suitable rules of engagement, but always designed so that casual meetings can achieve their extraordinary creative potential.

This article is part of the elaborate phase of diffusion of #OP2020 Uno Di Un Milione, i.e. how we have decided to act in the immediate future.

www.unodiunmilione.com
www.collettivoop.com

Cover image: Luca Lagash in a picture taken by MOG on the perennial glacier of Val di Sole