Project

For the opening of Mare Culturale Urbano, a new cultural center dedicated to building communities in a suburban area of Milan, the project #costruirelimprovviso was launched to create a first contact and relationship with the neighbourhood. The project focused on building furniture through participative self-construction creating the new spaces of the cultural center.

Set as an open workshop, volunteers were welcomed to join the process, together with young people from social organizations of the neighbourhood and of the municipality. Furthermore, relationships with design institutions such as Politecnico di Milano and IED Milano were created in order to involve students in an onsite learning process. Current and former students of the photography institution cfp Bauer – Afol Metropolitana have illustrated the whole process through some personal investigations on the neighbourhood, on self-construction and on the social aspect of involving different people. The cultural center opened on June the 21st 2016 in a renovated farmstead close to San Siro Stadium, a highly multicultural area located at the beginning of the northern suburbs of the city, a neighbourhood which is poor in cultural and aggregations spaces. The center is meant to be a place for theater, music, outdoor cinema, cowoking, relaxing and eating. The furniture produced in a “big manual small scale” was meant to respond to these needs, so mostly chairs, tables, stools and shelves were built, in addition to bigger scale objects, such as a stage, the counter and the pergolas.