Our vision
Our vision of impact (that is, the perspective of change we seek to activate in society through our work) is rooted in the urgency to renew the role that art and culture play in our societies, imagining a world in which art is recognised as a necessary practice for generating processes of transformation of communities and territories from a civic-activist perspective.
To respond to this vision and to move as close as possible to this horizon of change, Amigdala has defined two complementary overarching impact objectives: one oriented outward (towards the world, the contexts, communities, and territories we work with), and one oriented inward (towards Amigdala as an organisation and cultural infrastructure).
External impact objective > To create spaces for sharing through artistic and cultural processes that stimulate new imaginaries, amplify practices of collective care for territories, and foster their broadest accessibility.
Internal impact objective > To build an ecological, decentralised, accessible cultural organisation that is safe for everyone, relationship-based, capable of sustaining artistic work, and in dialogue with the wider world.
This dual orientation (external/internal) also informs the four impact dimensions, which partly reflect this logic and make it possible to describe more precisely how change occurs and where it manifests.
Impact dimensions
Based on these objectives, we have identified four impact dimensions—areas in which transformations must take place in order to achieve the desired change. The four dimensions are interconnected and all contribute to the achievement of the two impact objectives; however, predominantly, the first two relate to the external impact objective, while the latter two refer more strongly to the internal impact objective.
Through these four dimensions, it has been possible to handle complexity and to approach the evaluation process with solid and precise tools.
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 public space and in the places of everyday life within the city, Amigdala works to produce alternative critical cartographies of the city, to question the dynamics of the social production of space, and at the same time to activate new possible imaginaries as well as new alliances and networks of care. This process fosters dialogue among residents, public administration, and the third sector. Starting from the awareness that urban public space is not neutral, Amigdala works to bring to light invisibilised narratives that call for a re-reading and reinterpretation of the city’s public heritage—both material and immaterial.
Valuing Artistic 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, decentralised and non-hierarchical organisational models, 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.
Multiplication of knowledge within the artistic ecosystem
Amigdala’s practices understand art as a poetics of the real: a living, porous, and situated practice, capable of encountering the world and taking a stand within its conflicts, fractures, and injustices, grounded in the belief that art can and must act as a form of civic and cultural activism. In this sense, Amigdala’s practices seek to make the artistic and cultural field accessible, permeable, and open to people of different ages, forms of knowledge, and biographies, while recognising the need to learn from the widest range of contexts and to build an artistic practice capable of traversing reality and acting as a transformative force. This approach is grounded in the construction of transversal alliances with worlds that may be very distant from the artistic and cultural sector, adopting a cross-disciplinary and scalable perspective that weaves together art, education, urban morphology, oral history, civic design, anthropology, and many other fields.
ph Marika Puicher, performance KIN, Modena 2022
For more information and to read the Table of Contents and impact assessment of the 2022 edition of the Periferico festival, you can consult the report here
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