# Transversal Practices

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<summary>Contents of this page</summary>

* [Periferico](#periferico)
* [OvestLab](#ovestlab)

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Amigdala, by nature a **transdisciplinary collective,** brings together multiple areas of work.\
Each field is defined by its own specific features, yet they constantly cross-pollinate and collaborate synergistically within the projects carried out by the Collective.

What follows is a way of giving voice to this **transversality of intentions and expertise** through the two most important and long-standing projects led by Amigdala.

## Periferico festival

The word *Festival* is invariable in both singular and plural form. It expresses a multitude — a collective endeavour, a platform for free aggregation.\
Since 2008, *Periferico* has served as a container for various curatorial devices: nomadic practices, the occupation of abandoned spaces, the reactivation of urban voids, and the construction of relationships between art and the inhabitants of different neighbourhoods in Modena.

The festival’s core mission is to experiment with, host, and investigate **site-specific and participatory artistic practices**, rooted in precise and radical working methodologies that engage with specific places and communities.

From its very beginnings, Periferico has been held in non-theatrical spaces — everyday locations or heritage sites chosen for their architectural or historical significance — inhabited through artistic actions that enter into dialogue with the space and its meanings.\
Today, the festival is supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture within the National Performing Arts Fund, under the category of multidisciplinary festivals with a focus on theatre. It is also supported by **Fondazione di Modena** through the *Mi metto all’opera* call since 2021/2022, by **Regione Emilia-Romagna** under Law 13 for live performance, and by the **Municipality of Modena**, which acts as a strategic ally by sharing civic spaces and facilitating Amigdala’s interventions across the city.

## OvestLab

Since 2017, Amigdala has managed *OvestLab*, a hybrid cultural centre born from the regeneration of a former 1950s carpentry workshop in Modena’s Villaggio Artigiano — a neighbourhood once emblematic of economic and social innovation, now facing post-industrial decline and the challenges of climate and social crises.\
OvestLab operates as a **civic factory**, transforming a former production site into a co-creation hub where residents actively participate in the neighbourhood’s transition.\
Through **site- and community-specific artistic processes**, OvestLab weaves together public art, civic design, temporary reuse, and participatory practices. It also functions as an open space for various movements, organisations, and activist groups across the city, collaborating on issues such as gender-based violence, environmental crisis, and civil rights.

The space hosts a constellation of **resident artistic communities**, groups who co-create projects and, in some cases, autonomously shape their presence within the space.

Recognised nationally and internationally — as a best practice at the 2022 *Biennale della Prossimità* and selected by the *Future Architecture Platform* — OvestLab is celebrated for its interscalar, generative relationship between local community and global context.\
Managed by Amigdala in partnership with the **Consortium for Productive Activities of the Province of Modena**, OvestLab is part of a broader cultural network that has fostered a **distributed cultural centre** across the Villaggio Artigiano. Abandoned workshops, schools, courtyards, and gyms become spaces for experimentation, where citizens, artists, and artisans meet and build new connections between knowledge systems.\
In close collaboration with **Fondazione Archivio Leonardi** (which curates the nearby *Cesare Leonardi House-Archive*) and **Learco Menabue**, a local property owner, OvestLab explores a **rhizomatic, dispersed model of cultural action** that also reimagines the use and meaning of public space.<br>

<sub><mark style="color:blue;">ph Francesco Fantoni, performance<mark style="color:blue;"></sub> <sub><mark style="color:blue;"> </sub><sub>*<mark style="color:blue;">IN-CON-TRA</mark>*</sub> <sub><mark style="color:blue;"> </sub><sub><mark style="color:blue;">di Collettivo Amigdala, Piazza Grande, Modena nell'ambito di Modena Città Interculturale, 2024<mark style="color:blue;"></sub>
