Project Description

The Tor Sapienza I-Lab is a self-narration and video-narration workshop attended by ten boys and girls aged between 12 and 15, students of a middle school in Tor Sapienza, a strongly disavdantaged Roman district. The workshop was designed by the Pianoterra Foundation in collaboration with Antropos social cooperative and the Archive of Migrant Memories.

After an educational path based on verbal, graphic, bodily and musical storytelling and on listening, with a horizontal and inclusive teaching approach, the children discussed important topics relating to their lives and their future. They did it by playing, challenging adults and trying to imagine a new school.

The workshop went on for the entire 2016-2017 school year and was carried out by educators of Antropos and of the Archive of Migrant Memories. The final result is a short film entitled “T’imparano” (roughly translated as “They teach you”), directed by the Italian-Sri Lankan director Suranga D. Katugampala, who guided the students to self-narration through videomaking.

Piece by piece we put together this little big work, with the ultimate idea of ​​showing a story that can reflect the boys and girls who participated in the workshop. We did a beautiful teamwork, made artistic decisions together, empathizing with the little things, without a script, pushed forward by feeling. A spontaneous story came out, and now we are ready to share it with you.

(S. Katugampala)