BUILDING COMMON GROUNDS
Why we exist as a cultural place:
crafted by a small team of volunteers for and with a broader community of creatives
Duemila30 moves from our intrinsic need to find new and more integrated ways to be together. It moves from our deeply personal and rooted need to free our creative force, to have an impact in which to recognise and fulfil ourselves. It moves from our unshakeable belief that such impact, in order to be effective and disruptive, can only be relational and that it is only through affection, generosity and care that we can truly spark transformative and healing actions.
These beliefs are intimate, developed through the personal journeys that have brought each of us (through different paths, struggles, and satisfactions) to share this experimental, caring, and transformative experience that is Duemila30. From our inner worlds to the outer world, we want to share them through our cultural actions with everyone who wishes to join us in this creative endeavour.
Duemila30 operates through art, and specifically films, intended as a means to affirm our right to create new relational ways to stay together. The movie industry is filled with spaces and projects that affirm aesthetic and artistic values as the ultimate ones to aspire to. Our goal is different, we aim to create a complementary and parallel space, one where the value of what is created cannot be split from the way people meet in the process of creation.
We understand our spaces as places, that is, as environments shaped not simply by their physical boundaries or programme of activities; but by the encounters, emotions, and shared experiences that give them meaning. We center our action on relationality. We believe that through care, generosity and understanding it is possible to reach the same, if not a deeper, level of satisfaction and fulfillment as through competition. We do not only wish to imagine an alternative, we wish to make it visible, tangible and possible.
We believe that each participant is a bearer of tangible hope.
What success means for us
We strive for a global human community, defined by its process of interaction rather than by the outputs it releases. We strive for a place that is not limited to a cultural programme (being it a festival or a residency) but that continues to exist in the open-ended questions and the new scenarios of future possibilities unleashed as a driving force in the people inhabiting such co-created place.
For us success is not only measured through the number of people that our programmes reach, the artistic quality of the short films we screen or the visibility and growth reached by our organisation. For us, success means creating places where hope becomes tangible, where we can all experiment, and therefore sometimes fail, to relate to others, to create and to be in the world in a different way. The result we care most about is seeing the faces of the people who keep coming back and those who leave our programmes with new questions, new personal drives and the inner belief that something inside of them has been moved.
For us, success begins when even one person believes that the process towards a goal matters as much as the goal itself.
How we are choosing to be together
We welcome people with a smile, with warmth and with a generosity that seeks to go beyond professionalism and that we ask everyone to reciprocate. We welcome people with commitment, but without taking ourselves too seriously.
We recognise each other as global citizens: equal in dignity while different in personal backgrounds, identities, sensibilities, vulnerabilities and opportunities. These differences enrich us and will not be allowed to turn in power hierarchies nor boundaries that separate us. We craft places where people joining have the possibility to not only be recipients of an experience designed by others, but have the power and responsibility to influence it, transform it and feel it their own. We believe in co-creation and in genuine horizontal collaboration. This does not mean pretending that roles, responsibilities and power do not exist, but rather making them visible, opening them up to discussion and striving not to concentrate them always in the hands of the same people. We want to hand over a genuine part of the project to those who are part of it.
We are not striving for a community free from conflict. We believe conflict is part of us, and will always be part of human relations, therefore always inhabiting places like Duemila30. We do not wish to conceal it in order to preserve a mere semblance of harmony, nor do we wish to immediately turn it into silence, isolation or exclusion. We seek, first within ourselves and then within our community, not to avoid conflict but to inhabit it. We bring it into the open, making it part of our personal and collective processes so that it can become a place for convergence, mutual care, and transformation. We believe that only by recognising conflict for what it is, rather than denying or hiding it, can we begin a genuine process of coming together, both as individuals and as a community.
We actively choose dialogue and the attempt to question one’s own certainties, by recognising the other as equal in dignity and therefore deserving of our relational efforts. This is not simply something we would like to see; it is the fundamental rule that everyone must follow in order to continue being part of our places.
We take responsibility for how we meet and interact with the surroundings. We leave people in a better place than how we found them. The community also lives through the spaces, time, and resources it shares with the external world. We commit to taking care of the relationships, venues, tools, and materials provided, recognizing the often invisible work required to make this experience possible.
Our shared commitment
Entering the Duemila30 community means accepting that the place is not already given, but is built day by day through our actions. We do not ask people to be perfect. We ask them to be present, willing to listen and capable of taking responsibility for what they bring into their relationships. We want to create a place in which it is possible to make mistakes, change one’s mind, ask for help and grow together. A place in which care does not remain merely a word, but becomes a concrete way of being in the world.
