Project

Versione Italiana 

DYNAMICA 
nomadic study group  

A study group has taken form in Bologna, bringing about the artistic process results coming out from constant, imaginative stimuli and questioning.  It is an self-educational space to discuss the role, methods, goals and function of culture, as a necessary foundation for the construction of a possible social and political vision.  This research is lead by a cultural approach, capable of building bridges between different areas of knowledge – from science to art to religion – with a focus on the traditions and cultures of different countries. 
Dynamica is conceived as a series of meetings on topics related to people that have gone beyond their field of study. These "conversations" could also to give rise to artistic performances and actions, presented to the public in a final event.



From the idea of a free universities to a nomadic study group.
In its diversity, the idea of a free “school” implied different experiments of independent contexts that explored various subjects such as training, knowledge and artistic process.  For example, the conferences, meetings, laboratories from the beginning of the 20th century characterized the activities of various happenings in Monte Verità.  The Anti-University of London, founded by David Cooper and Allen Krebs at the end of the 1960s, spoke about revolution, science, art and much more. The Free University of Joseph Beuys, founded in 1973 explored creativity and interdisciplinary research. The Free University of Alcatraz by Jacopo Fo explored theater, among artistic, cultural and health practices.

Dynamica is not a school but a study group: it is free, open to everyone and it aims to bring together some  people in a cultural laboratory. The result is to integrate an important educational and artistic process. The goal is to "talk" about issues that refer to historical or current figures, people who have worked on the borders and beyond their field of study. The speakers -coming from different disciplines- introduce the theme. There is a didactic relationship but everyone is invited to participate with her/his knowledge: younger people have much to learn but will be encouraged to express their views; older and more exprienced people will have to have an attitude of humility and at the same time share their talents. The process will produce a synthesis of keywords on which we will develop, through a creative process, our first matter. On the base of these experiences the project may be developed in other countries, in the following years.

An independent study group, international and nomadic.
A network that offers the possibility of exchange, research and experimentation.
The dynamicity allows a continuous exchange and thus prevents dangerous automatism. The possibility of displacing people, provides an energy that fights the sclerotisation of roles, responsibilities and powers.

Dynamica is open to everybody. Seats can be "mobile": a park, an apartment, a public place, an institution. The study program will be set up to have a continuity, but at the same time, to give you the opportunity to follow each single lesson. It will have an informal, anti-bureaucratic character.
Referring to common educational goals, we intend in the future, to promote similar situations in the world, so that other study groups will take place in different countries. Each group should stay connected trough the various possibilities offered by the network (website, forum, etc.). Some meetings in different cities should be organized to promote and carry out an exchange between the participating people from different countries.
In addition some speakers, experts in different disciplines, will be invited for independent seminars.

Social implications
The focus is to create a common basis for building cognitive models and artistic practices in each country, leading to a reassessment of scientists, artists, philosophers, and common figures who have made a significant contribution in multidisciplinary researches. In the development of autonomous way study, in the courageous defence of principles and values opposed by colleagues in their specific disciplines. This common thread that binds national and international cities, it manifests itself in the freedom of a deliberate training, in  the affirmation of a thought capable of sustaining a non-academic research, by powering a process of living together, in a sense of community and defence of human values. Dynamica wants to affirm a primary value of social life and political work: a continuous and unstoppable movement for the recovery of cultural values, in search of our essence as human beings, through continuous analysis of the relationship between culture and its anomalies. It is a difficult task with a complex approach to overcome the limitations of a purely materialistic vision, to defeat the rough and monolithic law of profit, in order to look for those open doors to other worlds and laws that science seems to glimpse beyond with its disciplinary boundaries.

An idea of knowledge
a) The critical study of the history of culture in general and art history in particular, in order of putting into practice the design assumptions of relationships between different disciplines.
b) An idea of knowledge, which focuses on  ideas  and people - some of them have been relegated to cultural niches, often overlooked for political reasons or ignorance - which have courageously pushed beyond their disciplinary boundaries. An idea which gives way to a process of "re-evaluation", by searching for characters and ideas, which have produced and continue to produce, extraordinary cultural effects: those who works on the “verge” of different disciplines, by giving origin to unexpected visions and projections of the world. The creation of an imaginary that undermines established certainties, dogmas, and predetermination.
d) The matters of studying should have a double name (for example, arts/mathematics) and be included in broader categories and practices that highlight the aspect of the relationship between different disciplines.

Revaluation of historical, critical and cognitive
I quote three figures whose thought has acted in different knowledge by undermining their dogmas. Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli worked between theoretical physics and psychology (see chart Pauli-Jung on synchronicity). Simone Weil was an intellectual, worker, rebel and mystic. She has been working on the relationship between religion-spirituality (not theoretically, but with the whole body until starving  to support her idea of "de-creation"), Demetrio Stratos was a musician who started as a pop-musician to end with vocal experimentations and collaboration with John Cage.

















Wolfgang Pauli, physicist, was the theoretician of the "exclusion principle," a principle of quantum mechanics that allows the understanding of many of the distinctive characteristics of the material. Scientific research Pauli intertwined with psychology and faith. Science and faith were for him two poles through which groped a reconciliation of matter and spirit, inside and out. The relationship with Jung made a change in life and Pauli thought, whose studies turned in search of what he called a "neutral language" between faith and science.
It's in this “neutral space” between disciplines, that knowledge and languages are related, according to the principle of the relationship between differences, which is the basis of our reflection.

Demetrio Stratos, musician and singer, did research on vocal experimentation, which led him to achieve exceptional results. The eastern and western culture influenced his musical research and directed him to a study of ethnomusicology. The study and overcome physical limits of man, the search for the relationship between music/voice in the ancient civilizations of the East and the Middle East, together with the development of their musical projects, were the elements that inseparably accompanied the career and life Stratos, who made his throat a research tool, unique and inimitable.

Simone Weil was a philosopher whose research overrun by its scientific, intersecting with her experience, his political action, its religious tension. With his intensive analysis on political and social changes between the two wars, Weil denounced a world in which the individual had been reduced to a gear system voted to the idolatry of capital. Her dark vision of reality, however, was mediated by its religion, which allowed her to see a salvation after death and helped her to find the correct strength for an active political activism in anti-fascist movements and trotzskisti. Philosophical, political commitment and faith characterized all the way of life of the scholar, whose philosophy is always a back seat compared to the intense experience of life that is most often remembered.

I chose these three characters as an example, because they are emblematic of three fundamental aspects of knowledge. "The appearance of the global knowledge" characterized by truth and by its contradictions, represented by scientists (Pauli), the appearance of intellectual knowledge, or the "high culture," the custodian of a historical path of thought, expression of knowledge and freedom but also dogmatic and authoritarian positions, which becomes an interior experience, devotion and love (Weil). The appearance of the culture "comes from below," from the popular culture outside the academic world and it is developed through independent pathways (Stratos).







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