Love Difference group Milan
(Pippa Bacca, Alberto Mazza, Arianna Panarella, Noemi Satta, Coordinamento: Maria Chiara Piraccini)
Passatempo

Project curated by Love Difference

“Passatempo” (“Pastime”) is a project that initiates from some concrete requirements:
:: to experiment with methodologies of participation within urban contexts
:: to investigate Milan, the perception and description of city life through a theme which allows the description of a contemporary dimension
:: to use and share creative practices in order to turn them towards the sensitising of a social condition and to induce reflection.

The Passatempo project takes shape as an investigation into the “time” of contemporary Milan. The gaze is focused on the city through the lens of time, and of the plurality of meanings which time takes on today in peoples lives.

Il tempo sempre più discontinuo e frammentario del lavoro
il tempo concitato della comunicazione e degli scambi
il tempo per gli affetti che diventa lusso da rubare
il tempo immobile dell'attesa
il tempo imposto, subito, misurabile nella velocità dei passi, nell'accelerazione dei pensieri.

Ever more frequent phenomena which are radically changing our society, for sure…but which maybe in this city have a particular resonance, more intense and charged with consequences.

We would like to find new subtle ways, hopefully playful, to investigate, to guide our thoughts with a new attention which we can distract from the flow, to calm ourselves
and make us appreciate a new idea of the present. A constructive and contingent time revealed to ourselves and shared with others.
Passatempo as an activity, as a game.
Passatempo: time that passes, (apparently) frivolously.
Realise its passing, of life which is contained in it, or even of the plurality of simultaneous lives.

Can a city help us with this? And what can we do to bring it closer to us?

The exploration in the field, has been until now carried out using qualitative interviews and dialogues. Also using contributions gathered on various occasions of meetings and temporary installations, realised in the form of games and finalised in a direct participation of the public in order to augment the research with ideas, memories and opinions; a collective calendar, a game to associate the senses to the various moments of a day, a shared experience of immobility and of the stopping of time.
All these initiatives took place within the Isola Art Center project (www.isolartcenter.org), with whom the Love Difference group actively collaborated.

The cognitive phase of the project and its restitution were intended as occasions of relations, sharing of practicalities and spaces of reflection.
The description is intended as an instrument of awareness, the representation is not neutral, and it takes advantage of the contribution of those who intend to collaborate in the creation of the definition of time, through their own sensations, emotions and personal living experiences.

Until now, the results achieved constitute a mosaic of thoughts that recognise the importance on life of ever more agitated and fragmented rhythms of work and communication in everyday life, but also of so many themes which graze the life experience, the memories and the intimacy of the person involved.
All this, will be translated in a collective, multi faceted and open definition, aiming to re-appropriate, through differences, a new humanity of time.

To participate:
chiarap@lovedifference.org
workshop@lovedifference.org