RetroBottega 2023

Retrobottega, the all-digital pre-festival, kicks off on September 5th, introducing some of the themes of the “real” festival! This year Retrobottega focuses on "the places we live in" (title of the face-to-face panel to be held on September 16th): an attempt to offer non-trivial points of view on the way we travel the world, interpret it, perceive it and transform it. The online events address the theme of places from different points of view but keeping always the focus on “the thought of living together”, or of urbanity as a prevalent and immanent human condition. 

With Maria Rita Gisotti and Massimo Carta the topic will be how in Italy, since the Second World War, urban planning has developed projects and strategies to respond to the epochal challenges that have affected our country in its Mediterranean positioning. This Mediterranean positioning (a knowledge always present at the festival) will be addressed by Cecilia Fumagalli, Eliana Martinelli and Claudia Sansò who will talk about architectures, places and territories while presenting “DAr”, a magazine specialised in Islamic architecture seen from new points of view and as a language capable of uniting different cultures. With Filippo Tantillo we talk about places that are rapidly transforming, depopulating, showing different souls of their being and opening up to a thousand different possibilities. Another kind of crisis and emergency is the climatic and ecological one illustrated by Andrea Fantini confronting us with global phenomena that need to be tackled with very high levels of awareness, information and cooperation. Finally, two examples of "places" to give materiality to transformations that question us about the future. The first is an interpretation of the Sardinian territory through its mines, its mining landscape, its stories, its peculiarities, its possible lessons for a different contemporaneity. The second place is the Natural Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, theatre of the story of Morena, a brown Marsican bear who reminds us of the fragility of environmental balances in an increasingly urbanised and settled world, where the care of the relationship of the human species with the rest of the living world is perhaps the main key to try a new and better way of living - together - our planet.