SuperAbile

The hypothesis of the project  “A WORLD FOR ALL – Workshop on human diversity throughout the country” – arises to foster the diffusion of accessible tourism culture and also an expanded awareness, which respects the physical, psychological, social, cultural, religious, political and philosophical differences.
This project is related to similar initiatives undertaken by TANDEM, a Social and Integrated Co-operative, in Primary and Secondary Schools of the regional country.

School has a fundamental role in educating about multicultural and cross-cultural issues and comparison/exchange among differences and should raise awareness of an open-minded culture in enabling to fully integrate those people, who are considered  “different”.
We have reached the conclusion that we don’t simply have to show the architectural and cultural barriers, but it is also necessary to build with the same children a cultural meeting and a cultural exchange, by paying attention to the different personalities and to everyone’s needs.

The diversity related to the physical, mental or sensory disability experience has always been generally considered as a disadvantaged and negative condition, on the contrary the integration experience shows that handicap is essentially caused by social organization structurally unable to reduce or eliminate the disadvantage of disability.
Therefore it is necessary, nowadays, to shift from a handicap culture to a “normality culture” which affirms the difference of every human being as a normal condition referring to a positive resource, as a various heritage of culture, capacity, capabilities of living.
The principle of non-discrimination declared by the Treaty of Amsterdam considers, in concrete terms, the person with disabilities as an individual who plays an active role in society and is entitled to rights and human, moral, social, economical, cultural duties.
In order to protect rights, it is necessary to enable “full participation” which guarantees everyone the opportunity to live on an equal basis with others.

The project  “A WORLD FOR ALL- Workshop on human diversity throughout the country” has been realized in two different Primary Schools of Rome and has been structured through a series of activities with amateur and expressive dramatics, also including specific actions with disabled pupils.
The educational programmes based on the concept of human diversity have been in parallel, directed by working members with disabilities and experts at amateur and expressive dramatics.
The project took place in and outside of the Schools, with guided tours in archeological, artistic and cultural areas (Ostia Antica) in the countryside and around the Schools (Appio-Tuscolano district).
Working members in wheelchairs have guided the cultural tours, so that they could show the pupils the difficulties of some routes, because of the architectural barriers. With regard to this, several studies have been evolved and accessible tourist routes have been realized to meet specific needs of disabled people.

The educational programmes recommended to the pupils and teachers of the Schools are based on a theatrical laboratory and on expressive activities as hypothesis of a permanent workshop on human diversity throughout the country.

This hypothesis is meant to be an educational goal that has to be confirmed during the informative/training course and is also supposed to be an operational tool and an interacting modality of the same course.
The physical, psychological, sensory, cultural, political, religious, ethnic and financial diversities are not considered causes of discrimination and exclusion, but an opportunity of reciprocal exchange and common evolving capacities, if listening constantly the other.
In this way, the Workshop becomes research for a possible and daily place, where all city dwellers can fully live, participate and experiment from the earliest age, by also detecting the problems of the country and proposing, in a concrete way, solutions concerning a peaceful cross-cultural coexistence.

Contemporaneously with this itinerary, the Workshop has studied several and possible cultural, social actions in order to gradually shift from a diffused mentality, which considers the person with disabilities as an object in need of assistance to a new culture, which recognizes the worth of human diversity, by particularly enhancing the person with disabilities as an individual who is actively involved in society.
A multimedia Workshop becomes the opportunity of a breaking ground towards preconceptions, in approaching to reality in its various forms, including all languages.
It is necessary to take possession of their own Traditions (spiritual, social, cultural, political, etc) as Human Being and Community, to rediscover and recover those non-verbal languages, which do not exist anymore but still live in the education system of Human Being- Human Body.
Space is not only meant as a “metric space” but it’s also a “sensible space”.
It is an internal, external space of movement, colours, sounds, scents, flavors, darkness, light that have a muscular tone and trace-routes.
Every individual carries over his own bodily-sensory traditions, which we should be able to read, to keep on writing together in his language, still alive in the memory of everyone’s body.
To each object of the physical world belongs a sound animated by energy. Movement is life expression and so it is a sonorous, chromatic, plastic trace, developing in space by radiation. Living is tracing the emptiness in a sonorous and graphic way with its own form, destined for the communication already inherent in his physical features: we are our body-trace.
The Workshop on human diversity throughout the country is a way to re-discover, from an anthropological point of view, his own Human Being-Human Body, meant as the essence of Human Being.
The Workshop is a “work in progress” in the true sense of the word; it gives everybody the opportunity to wonder and to ask reasonable questions. You need to realize the impossibility to give definitive answers and the necessity to elaborate their own individual and collective model of dialectical interchange, in order to recover the past memory and the species.
At the end of the training course, it is very important to organize a big feast, where the pupils of the Schools offer alternative procedures to an education System and consumerist Society which does not often take into account the needs, the dreams and the wishes of the youngest people, by proposing developing processes, such as an intercultural exhibition and a theatrical performance.
The proposal of a final, multicultural and intercultural feast means inviting ordinary people, so that they can, more often and easily, be involved in diversity.
Our feast is a meeting among people, who like shouting, playing, knowing each other and being together. People who have never had the courage to entirely show their feelings and people that have been always cast out because of their diversity.


(Traduzione dall'italiano all'inglese a cura di Vincenzo Goffredo - Supervisione di Manuela Taddeo)