Città Foresta, the winning project of the ‘Estate Romana 2022 – Riaccendiamo la città, Insieme‘ (Roman Summer 2022 – Let’s re-ignite the city, together), is a workshop festival that took place over 11 days in July-October in three Roman neighbourhoods: Trullo, Laurentino 38 and Corviale. The festival aims to involve a wide and diverse audience by focusing on nature, green areas, their ability to become pulsating centres of aggregation, creativity and encounter, and their relationship with the surrounding urban areas.
Together with associations and artists, workshops in construction, drawing, theatre, storytelling, printing, music and nature walks were devised, leading the public to a greater awareness of urban and natural spaces. The three neighbourhoods chosen for the activities are characterised by being densely populated areas, but also by the presence of large green areas that are often unused. The workshops, which were entirely for free and available by reservation, served to create moments of confrontation, co-creation, exchange and discussion in order to relate the chosen neighbourhoods.
Città Foresta takes inspiration from the morphology of the city with the intention of rethinking and enhancing green areas. “Do City”, “Do Nature” to rebuild, where it has been lost, the will to interact, create relationships and new opportunities to care for the ecosystem that surrounds us.
Through the collaboration of numerous artists and associations, Città Foresta built together with the community a new narrative, an eco-urban environment to raise awareness of the conscious use of green spaces. For 10 days we traversed, explored, built, coloured and animated the green areas of the three neighbourhoods with activities related to music, theatre, architecture and street art dedicated to a varied audience of children, young people and adults.
The Final Event of Città Foresta was held on 8 October 2022 at the Corviale Theatre: a moment of restitution and sharing of all the activities carried out during the three months of workshops.
A day full of meetings, performances, narrations and monsters presented by Ponte Radio. The A.I.Me.F and Laboratorio di Città Corviale associations told us about their naturalistic walks, the sound of the plants and the activities carried out to raise awareness on the relationship between city and nature. Following, the “Gang dell’ARCA”, a group of strange fantastic beings created by the children in the GROOVE’s workshops, came to life thanks to the small actors who created the performance inside our ARCA (VIVIAMOLAq). Together with Maria Angeles Vila Tortosa and her printed sheets we reflected on the values of care, regeneration and rebirth, creating with her and the participants the ideal new roots of our Città Foresta. With John Cascone, his “research group” and his “guided imagination exercises”, we recalled the primordial sound forest of TruLauCor, which united the districts of Trullo, Laurentino and Corviale.
The artist Jacopo Natoli also contributed to the final event with an interactive performance aimed to investigate the relationship between natural environment and urban scenario through the construction of a new Città Foresta ABC book.
During the final event took also place the final restitution of City Jungle, a project created for the international platform Magic Carpets, co-financed by Creative Europe Programme, which involved the artists Berta Tilmantaitė (Lithuania), Sunny Nwume aka Black Elektronika (Italy) and the communities of Laurentino and Corviale.
