Our vision
Amigdala has set a general impact goal to "Create sharing spaces through artistic and cultural processes that stimulate new imaginaries and amplify the possibilities for collective healing of the city." Our vision of impact (thus the perspective of change we want to initiate in society through our work) is rooted in the urgent need to renew the role of art and culture in our societies, envisioning that **"civic imagination and art become fundamental resources for the social well-being of cities."
Impact dimensions
Through the four dimensions, which are naturally interconnected and constantly produce crossovers and interactions, it has been possible to handle complexity and tackle the evaluation process with solid and precise tools. Starting from these objectives, we identified four dimensions of impact, which are areas where transformations must occur to achieve the desired change. To realize the desired (macro) impact, various changes must happen simultaneously in different areas and among different groups of beneficiaries.
Fostering Collective Agency
Amigdala stimulates the creation of temporary intergenerational, intercultural, and intersectional communities through artistic and cultural projects that encourage city inhabitants to engage in collective meaning dimensions and choral practices. This involves experimenting with artistic languages and relational forms that can impact both empathically and competitively. Generating collective bodies, even temporary ones, allows for the exploration of possible coexistence practices, sharing forms, and a doing together that enables "perceiving things from multiple perspectives at once" (Nora Bateson).
Reimagining Urban Living
Through participatory artistic actions in the city's public spaces and daily life locations, the aim is to produce critical alternative cartographies of the city, question the social production dynamics of space, and simultaneously activate new possible imaginaries and new alliances and care networks, fostering dialogue among residents, public administration, and the third sector. Starting from the awareness that the city's public space is not neutral, Amigdala works to expose those invisible narratives that call for a re-reading and reinterpretation of the city's public heritage - both material and immaterial.
Valuing Cultural Work
Artistic work today needs to be recognized as a potential tool for comprehensive social, urban, and cultural change, an exceptional resource capable of generating rights and individual, collective, psychological, and economic well-being, both externally and within organizations. Amigdala aims to enhance the quality and professionalism of artistic work, which intersects with welfare and social sectors, promoting stable employment, staff qualification, equitable and generative workspaces, generational renewal, and demonstrating the need for artistic presence in urban and social policy development in our city. This broad area of intervention also includes the systematization of methodologies and achieved results, in terms of replicability and continuous improvement.
Diversifying the Artistic Ecosystem
Amigdala's practices aim to make the artistic and cultural fields accessible, permeable, and open to people of different ages, knowledge, and backgrounds, aware of the need to learn from various domains and to make our work porous so it can serve as a practice of real transformation. Building cross-sector alliances with fields far removed from the artistic-cultural sector, with a cross-disciplinary and scalable approach, intertwining **art, education, urban morphology, oral history, civic design, anthropology, and many other disciplines.
ph Marika Puicher, performance KIN, Modena 2022
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