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We are a small, not-for-profit cultural organisation, a group of friends who have been working together since our last year of high school to create a dynamic space, a tool for creativity and social change to thrive and influence each other.

We are neither creatives nor activists; we don’t pretend to be and firmly refuse to appropriate others’ practices and knowledge. At the same time, we are programmers and planners. From the beginning, we realised the importance of crafting our own practice that resonates with our truths and responds to our personal and professional energies.

We are fascinated by the creative outcomes of collisions, those between cultures, people, projects, and practices. We believe that for this collision process to be effective, it needs to be disruptive, focusing our attention on the younger generations and their uncontaminated dreams.

WHAT WE DO

We craft spaces that are cultural, co-created, and often global. We strive to give these spaces meaning by signifying the actions that take place in them and the people who perform those actions. We believe that meanings do not only reside in individuals or messages but are a joint accomplishment of participants in communion, derived from social, political, and interpersonal circumstances. Our practice is not only about gathering people with common goals but primarily about establishing a type of communication that emphasises the co-creation of agreement and the organisation of new relationships shared by the participants.

HOW WE DO IT

We start by acknowledging the existence of conflicts and realising that we live in a world where radical processes of dehumanisation are shaping our realities and imaginaries. This world is imbued with challenges and conflicts that are increasingly layered, intersectional, and interdependent. We affirm the need for a new beginning, of new processes of reconnection, rehumanisation, and solidarity. We need new spaces that are not only safe and protected but also caring and humanising.

We implement care practices in all our spaces, implementing a set of actions to make all beneficiaries active s. This creates a safe and protected space for the process of re-humanisation to happen.

We believe in the regenerative force of participation and education. We refuse the term ‘exclusive’ and adhere to its opposite. This is not only theoretical. In all our projects, we strive to abandon selective processes, finding solutions to guarantee participation for all. We prefer collaborative processes to competitive ones, drifting away from practices that have traditionally characterised the projects we create (such as festivals) and experimenting with new ways to create communities.

OUR STORY

We have come a long way since our first meeting over 10 years ago. Quindici19 was established in 2016 when we formalised what began as a student-led short film competition. This evolved into Duemila30, a festival rooted in Milan and initially organised at the request of the United Nations. Over the years, our work has received local and international recognition: we won the “Social Innovation Storytellers” award from Officine Buone and the “Creativity Pioneers” grant from the Moleskine Foundation, reinforcing our commitment to creativity for social change. In addition to Duemila30, we have launched projects like Che famo?, a summer arts festival, Dietro l’angolo, a community-driven response to the Covid-19 lockdowns, and WAVES, a network of youth-led socio-cultural activism organisations across Italy.

In our journey, we went from wanting to become big and famous to aiming to be meaningful and caring. What you read so far resonates with our current truth. We can’t say how long it will last, as we constantly adapt to the energy and dreams of the people we meet along the way.

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