How to Live Together: The Common School
Sreshta Rit Premnath, Cadere/Rose, 2017
How To Live Together: The Common School. Ph. Marco Passaro
How To Live Together: The Common School. Ph. Marco Passaro
How To Live Together: The Common School. Ph. Marco Passaro
A project part of the "alternanza scuola-lavoro", conceived by Raffaella Frascarelli and Maria Rosa Sossai.
Curated by ALAgroup
In collaboration with Istituto Einaudi, Rome
From January 9th to January 20th, 2017
How to Live Together: The Common School follows the recommendation of the General Direction of MIBACT – and shared by the fifteen Foundations part of the Comitato Fondazioni Italiane Arte Contemporanea – to engage young people in the urban outskirts with contemporary art.
As part of the Comitato Fondazioni Italiane Arte Contemporanea, which seeks to contribute to the promotion of contemporary art and cultural heritage, Nomas Foundation presents this project that aims to use active modes of learning to create a Common School.
Nomas Foundation and ALAgroup, in collaboration with Istituto Einaudi (Rome), invite Sreshta Rit Premnath to run a workshop with 24 students of the 4 M cohort of the Graphic Design Programme at Istituto Einaudi in Rome, via Borromeo branch, in Primavalle, within the alternanza scuola / lavoro. The teacher Stella Caracciolo will collaborate as a tutor.
Beginning with the hypothesis that selling flowers could be seen as an artistic performance, Premnath will lead students in an engagement with Bangladeshi flower sellers in Rome to help the class connect with these individuals and their communities. The aim of the workshop will be to develop an ethical sense of citizenship and an intimate view of an immigrant community in order to examine the boundaries between us and them in a time of refugee crisis in Europe.
The workshop consists of intensive meetings taking place from January 9th until January 20th, 2017, and is divided into two phases. In the first phase ALAgroup members have met the students and engaged them in preparatory activities focusing on community building, and have introduced students to the cultural background of the flower sellers. In the second phase of the workshop, led by Premnath, along with members of ALAgroup, students will explore the city by paying attention to the people and things that they may often overlook in their daily lives. By interviewing Bangladeshi flower sellers as well as each other, and working together on video, photography and drawing projects, they will be introduced to an active and collaborative mode of learning that binds education to the practice of everyday life.
On January 20th, from 6 pm to 9 pm, we will celebrate the end of the session with a moment of sharing and conviviality, which will include snacks and drinks hosted at a Bangladeshi community center in Tor Pignattara (Sala Dhuumcatu), via Capua 4. The event will be marked by the launch of a zine produced during the workshop, as well as a performance by Premnath titled Cadere/Rose, followed by a discussion.
">Sreshta Rit Premnath (1979, Bangalore, India) lives and works in New York.
He has studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Bard College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is an artist who works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history. He is the founder and editor of the publication ">Shifter and teaches at Parsons Fine Arts in New York.
ALAgroup, Accademia Libera delle Arti (free academy of the arts) is an independent platform for contemporary art and education that conceives of artistic practice as a process of shared knowledge.
ALAgroup has curated projects including AN EDUCATION (2013), a series of six workshops and exhibitions of artists at FAI Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese. In 2016 ALAgroup curated the residency and workshop WE+MUSEUM= TO DREAM A VISION OR TO VISION A DREAM? by the artists Valentina Bonizzi and Driant Zeneli at the Dheishe refugee camp, in Bethlehem, within the Campus in Camps project. The other members of Alagroup are Maria Pia Bevilacqua, Sara Maria d’Onofrio, Alessandro Mingione, Marco Passaro.