The Project
Imagine culturally vibrant hamlets, steeped in tradition and once home to a well-lived life in tranquillity… All of a sudden, these inland villages, whether physical or abstract, are swept away by a catastrophic, unprecedented event and transformed into non-places. Broken by hardship and hard to recognise, these post-disaster areas combine lost geographies, community trauma, and empty living environments. But… if you look more closely, you can catch sight of a figure who is picking up and holding the shattered pieces of the affected place together. That individual is making an effort to rebuild the memoryscape and forge renewed place bonding.
Conjured up by the project logo, this highly emotional image symbolises the community’s will to bounce back and arise from adversity.
Inspired by the operational principle of repairing and revitalising the social fabric of inner places in Europe, ImproLANDS, a 22-month small-scale European cooperation project co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, leverages the art of improvisational theatre as a powerful community builder and aggregator. While developing self-discovery and self-expression, improv has the unique ability to deepen connections and encourage people tap into wider emotions. As such, it meets people’s expressive needs to create something that individuals could never achieve alone.
European remote areas, often referred to also as innerlands, lonely places, out-of-this-world places, are characterised by profound disparities in terms of demographic trends, spatial organisation, access to essential services, employment, gender inclusiveness, and equal opportunities compared to urban centres. These unique structural challenges, intertwined with the ongoing economic and climate crises, have been exacerbated by the crippling impact of the Covid-19 crisis.
To tackle this ongoing process of abandonment and degradation, the consortium partners have embraced the idea of using participatory arts to foster social inclusion and curb loneliness experienced by individuals, communities, and places in targeted remote areas.
Create something that individuals could never achieve alone
Newfound social cohesion and sense of belonging
Drawing inspiration from the binomial ‘nature-culture’ relationship, invoked by the Italian National Strategy for Internal Areas (SNAI) and the research Nuovi Sentieri di sviluppo per l’Appennino marchigiano dopo il sisma del 2016 (“New development paths for the Marche Apennines after the 2016 earthquake”), as a way to promote new local development trajectories, the ImproLANDS project aims to shape collective experiences that positively connect people, the arts, and surrounding environments, whereby improvisational theatre constitutes the binding element for a newfound social cohesion and sense of belonging. By activating synergies among the EU’s sustainability goals, quality living spaces, and inclusive experimentation, it symbolises the partners’ commitment to contributing to the European Green Deal and the New Bauhaus movement. ImproLANDS is, therefore, to be read as an original place-bound initiative seeking to materialise the ‘leaving no territory and no one behind’ principles and ultimately convert “lonely places to places of opportunities,” based on a seminal study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
As supported by a plethora of evidence-based studies, in the post-pandemic world, the ‘healing’ power of cultural interventions actively engaging individuals in the creative process has become all the more prominent to improve their own health and well-being.