The tour of We did it! by Ateliersì, conceived by Fiorenza Menni and Andrea Mochi Sismondi, is coming. In the near future in which We did it! is set, the figure on stage accompanies us along the paths he has traveled with his contemporaries to overcome some of the crises that today compromise the permanence of life on Earth. Playing on the interferences between real events, feasible possibilities and experiences that were only conceivable until now, the show becomes a hypothetical documentary to crumble the TINA Paradigm (There Is No Alternative) by sharing scenarios in which people have developed more harmonious relationships with each other and with the other entities that live on the planet. In a future held in check by the present, We did it! goes through the changes in which we are immersed, from climatic upheavals to war, proposing the story of some processes that could germinate by evolving the cultural patterns that are the basis of our current life. With the support of the PNRR measure for the Ecological Transition of Cultural and Creative Organizations funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU. To learn more, on the occasion of the debut in Bologna on May 8 and 9, 2025, we decided to meet Fiorenza and Andrea.
“We did it!” di Fiorenza Menni e Andrea Mochi Sismondi, ph. Margherita Caprilli, courtesy Ateliersì
Sara Papini: Would you like to tell us about TINA?
Andrea Mochi Sismondi:The “There Is No Alternative” paradigm has been used for decades by politicians and economists to justify individualism as a human vocation and predatory capitalism as a “natural” system of development. Repeated like a mantra by the Western neoliberal right, starting with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it was coined in the first half of the nineteenth century by supporters of social Darwinism, or rather by those who distorted the intuitions of that magnificent and disruptive observer that was Darwin to legitimize the abuses of colonial, racial and class power. Today we are in the midst of a further transition: if in the past decades TINA was used to bury any alternative to the development of capitalist globalization, in this moment of nationalistic and protectionist choices it is taken as a slogan to justify the use of force and brutality as privileged tools for the exercise of power and the management of relationships. The new authoritarian governments tell us that there are no alternatives to the exploitation of natural resources to the point of environmental devastation, to the compression of the rights (if not the elimination of life) of the weakest for the needs of economic development and social harmony, to muscular opposition and consequently to rearmament and war. Here, in the show we work starting from the many possible alternatives, prefiguring their application in a near future that we imagine – together with the public – different. A brighter future in which the many experiences that today sail in the opposite direction – and that on a small scale demonstrate that they can work – have been assumed as new paradigms of existence.
“We did it!” di Fiorenza Menni e Andrea Mochi Sismondi, ph. Margherita Caprilli, courtesy Ateliersì
How did the idea for the show We did it! come about and how did its preparation develop?
Fiorenza Menni: Faced with the frictions of the present, the idea of making a documentary set in a future where things are “going well” has come to mind several times over the years. It was a recurring thought: it would be interesting to bring around new visions capable of overcoming the failure of the present, and to do so I was thinking of a sort of caravan that would unite the past and the future through the performative gesture. We talked about it together and two years ago Andrea proposed to catch the opportunity of a call for proposals that financed the intersections between art and green transition to create a prototype vehicle with which to travel with a new show without polluting and consuming energy, indeed producing it. The idea of We did it! took shape and in parallel with the development of the prototype, the dramaturgical research began, which as always we conducted together through a variety of sources: from scientific literature to sociological analysis, from popular documentaries to political philosophy, from direct comparison with experts, artists and designers, to newspaper reports and art criticism, to the search for a contamination between science and poetry that could coagulate awareness and frenzy of action around possible experiences of future life. What you see on stage is not a utopia – because it is composed of steps that are all achievable – but the evocation of a hypothetical future that shuns the caption and places the spectator in front of concrete facts shared through a research on language that rejects the linguistic flattening on the watchwords of sustainability policies, finding new, more imaginative and radical ways of expressing oneself.
“We did it!” di Fiorenza Menni e Andrea Mochi Sismondi, ph. Margherita Caprilli, courtesy Ateliersì
I would like to reflect on the idea of ”travelling theatre”: what does it mean to think about a show conceived like this?
Andrea Mochi Sismondi: It is first and foremost a political gesture: in the face of the rigidity of the cultural system – which is increasingly moving towards the centralization of production and programming in large structures managed in a top-down manner – relaunching the polycentrism of distribution, as well as production, seems fundamental to us. The capillarity that the We did it! tour allows us, thanks to its lightness of installation and the desire to meet the local communities that guides each of its stages (and which often materializes in intense meetings after the show, the result of the planning relationship established with each individual host organization) leads us to perform in theaters as well as in squares, in museum gardens as well as in parks and on the banks of rivers, in cities as well as in small towns in inland areas. For us, working on the accessibility of art also means reaching unusual places and meeting people who are different from those who usually meet in the foyers of theaters in big cities: we enjoy creating opportunities for meeting with the broadest possible languages of contemporary art; it is a mutual giving.
Fiorenza Menni: All this also fits into a particular moment in our artistic, professional and personal life. Our son is now almost twenty years old and for a long time – in addition to him – we have dedicated constant and daily care to the growth of Ateliersì, our theater in Bologna that together with our companions we have transformed into a laboratory for the development of new scenic languages open to the hospitality of other artists and thinkers and where a myriad of precious paths are now developing. Now we can get back on the road, with the grace that our electric cart allows and with the desire to imagine another future together with the people we meet every time.
Info:
May 8 and 9, 2025:
at 7:00 pm Radio Tunnel by Eterea Noise
at 8:30 pm We did it! by Ateliersì
tickets: www.ateliersi.it
She was born in Genoa but currently lives in Bologna, the city where she graduated from CITEM with a thesis on video art. She works in the world of events in the production sector and is an assistant professor of Visual Studies at UNIBO.
NO COMMENT