Overturning narratives on Mediterranean diaspora

Milano Mediterranea is a cultural organization rooted in Milan, but whose gaze extends towards the opposite coast of the Mediterranean Sea. By catching the fresh breeze coming from the north African diaspora, its aim is to start a process of decolonization both in arts and society.

Anna Serlenga and Rabii Brahim are respectively a stage director and actor, active between Milan and Tunis. Their aim is to use art as an instrument to ignite a public discourse on cultural colonialism and ultimately generate a social transformation, by establishing a new collective way of creating.

Camilla Colicchio What’s the story behind Milano Mediterranea?

Anna Serlenga I’m a stage director and researcher, and due to my studies in 2012 I went to Tunis. There I was conducting research on the local theatrical and performative scene, during and after the revolution and that’s how I met Rabii.

Rabii Brahim I’m an actor who graduated in Drama. We actually met in the framework of a theatre workshop led and directed by the faculty of the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Tunis – where I studied at that time – with a group of young emerging actors who witnessed the social and political movements before and after 2011.

Anna Serlenga We did our first show together, named Mouvma! Nous, qui avons encore 25 ans, and, meanwhile, in 2013 we started our artistic collective Corps Citoyen. During the years we spent in Tunisia – until 2018 – our work focused on developing a participatory practice that included in the creative process and narrative a fundamental question of who speaks and who has the right to speak in the public space. The answer we’ve always come up with is working and creating together. In 2018 we came back to Italy, and we realized that the public discourse on the decolonial issue, on the relationship with other cultures and non-natives, was really backward considering what we felt most pressing. So, we thought that, maybe, there was a way to change this colonial paternalism that still lives in western cultural production. That’s why we created a project that put at the center artists from the diaspora who lived in Italy, working, at the same time, inside a suburb that is home to an incredibly diverse range of ethnicities, with people that come from any part of the Mediterranean and beyond. We wanted to create spaces to establish a connection with the neighborhood and its community.

Rabii Brahim We started from our personal need, but then, looking at the Italian and European cultural production, we realized that it had always taken into consideration only one perspective, the representation is always imposed from the whiteness. So, we decided to create spaces where artists from the diaspora could display their artistic proposals.

Camilla Colicchio Something really curious is the organization’s name itself because Mediterranean is obviously not the first adjective that comes to mind when you have to describe Milan. But it’s actually a component that has been featuring the city since last century due to the internal migratory movements and, more recently, due to the northern African diaspora. So, how did you choose to tell the Mediterranean essence of Milan and where it lies?

Anna Serlenga Firstly, the idea of Milano Mediterranea was conceived to goad. A lot of friends, even those who come from Southern Italy and the Mediterranean region, laughed at this idea of a Mediterranean Milan. That’s a clash, for sure, an atypical crasis aimed at mirroring the idea of an overturning of narratives. Depending on which lens you choose to use, there are different narratives emerging. So, the idea was to dig and observe the Mediterranean in Milan, which is a result of both the internal and, more recently, external migrations that have inhabited the city. This was, for us, a key to start rewriting a different narrative. It’s not a coincidence that our logo features the word “Milano” in the Arabic alphabet at the top and the word “Mediterranea” written in the Latin alphabet at the bottom, it symbolizes the shift of the usual hierarchy in contents and perspective.

Rabii Brahim It is also an encouragement to look at what there’s in the city, all its suburban areas that exist but we pretend not to see. The policies and the cultural productions have always been custom tailored for the natives, who often forget about the existence of other voices inside the society that are forced to adapt. If you go for a walk in Milan you can listen to many different languages and sounds, you can smell many different perfumes. Our organization really wants to bring attention to this part of present-day Milan.

Camilla Colicchio The spatial dimension is central to your work. The organization was born in the Giambellino neighborhood, what are the features of this area and how has it impacted your practices?

Anna Serlenga As I mentioned before, to us it was extremely important not to land like a spaceship in a suburb. That’s what Milan’s event culture usually does: turn on the footlights and then leave. We wanted to start a collective project, sharing it with the neighborhood from the very beginning. We select our residents with the neighborhood committee, and together we try to understand what really matters, not absolutely speaking, but inside our community and relating to the area’s specific needs. We also try to imagine which discussions the residencies may lead to.

A neighborhood committee is an informal group of people who live in the area and help us select the proposals we receive from the open call. We do the selection process together and then they also follow the residencies and the festival we organize. We share a part of our authorship, which for us means taking a step back in the artistic direction. It means sharing our power, which is often taken for granted, as it was natural, but there are actually many ways to carry on an artistic direction. On the other side, the neighborhood is currently going through a lot of transformation due to the urban development plan, which is bringing the subway here, and also causing the clearing of the public housing. So, we must come up with artistic proposals that meet the community’s needs, and the translation effort between us and the neighborhood is constant. When we organize the festival, we do it keeping in mind the public space and the public’s reaction. Other times, we prefer to shock the audience, but we do it together. The neighborhood plays a central role in defining what we do.

Rabii Brahim We’re learning a lot by listening to them. We don’t want the artist to go there, do the show and the interviews speaking about the neighborhood, and then leave. That’s the only thing we ask the residents not to do, nothing else. We give them a space where they can create, we sustain them financially and logistically, and the only thing we ask back is doing something for the local community, keeping in mind their features and their needs. Thereafter, sharing flows horizontally.

Anna Serlenga As we have chosen not to own a place, we weave a network of spaces that host the residencies. According to the project, we figure out which space could be suitable for it. The neighborhood committee also gives us a big help in this, with suggestions and hints. It has always worked so far. It’s not about economic transactions, it’s more like a bank of time, we share experiences. This modus operandi has allowed us to create a really diverse network, which includes shisha bars, barbers, markets, florists, squares, and youth clubs. This also leads to the mixing and crossing of different types of audiences and discourses, ending up producing something that didn’t exist before.

Camilla Colicchio Have you noticed a difference between generation or socio-cultural classes in the way they react to your proposals?

Anna Serlenga Our initiative often refers to a younger audience. But I believe that, over time, Milano Mediterranea has built its own audience inside the city and its BIPOC community. We’re glad about that because one of our main goals was trying to retrieve that sense of community we missed when we returned to Italy. Our work has been since then about organizing events and inviting people ad hoc, branching out our initiative also according to different ages. That’s something really difficult to do.

Rabii Brahim That’s something you shouldn’t assume, because, on the communication level, when a neighborhood has other needs – where we work the housing and economic issues are the most pressing – culture is put on the back burner. In order to engage that user base, you have to always come up with new strategies, so that somebody is actually interested in our initiatives.

Camilla Colicchio All your programs and residencies are very different from one to another, I feel like there’s continuous research to always find new languages to tell this shift of narrative.

Anna Serlenga Yes, absolutely. During these years, we opened our doors to any artistic disciplines, our residencies hosted an extremely heterogeneous range of artists in terms of geography and discipline. We had illustrators in our first residency Emigrania, a choreographer like Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Ismael Condoy, who is a musician and composer of electronic music. This year, one of our residents is Soukaina Abrour, who works with masks and costumes. So, we’re really open to any discipline, although, personally, our first love is the performative arts. Being that open of course resulted in a high experimentation rate and allowed us to keep up with the urgencies of our time. This actually happens just by hosting young artists, who often have a different and original perspective, even just due to a question of age.

Camilla Colicchio But how do you manage to make all these voices sound like Milano Mediterranea’s one voice?

Rabii Brahim I believe that what actually helps us is the common point of departure. Then, what comes out is just another side. The point of departure is the space we open to our residents, where we share the same vision about art and decolonization. We share the same attitude towards artistic practice, whatever it is. But, above all, the basis we start from is our relationship with the neighborhood. Moving from here, everything else is just another branch, an added value.

Camilla Colicchio What’s the ultimate change you wish to ignite with this artistic practice?

Anna Serlenga To me, change has to do with a larger social transformation about what we perceive as different, is creating a more equal society in terms of rights. It has also to do with the fundamental issue of accessibility to culture regarding class inequality and decolonization and fostering a different perception but identical authority of others’ voices. That’s why we decided to base our organization in a working-class area, we wanted to reach younger underserved communities that otherwise wouldn’t have access to cultural initiatives.

Rabii Brahim What we want to communicate is not an actual message but rather an attitude towards creating, speaking, and representing. We need to start with the fact that we’re all the same.

Anna Serlenga Then, there’s also the theme of the role that art and culture have in our society. They’re too often relegated to making up and covering urban regeneration operations aimed at gentrification, especially in our city. We would like to recover the radical side of doing art, which for us is deeply political and therefore transformative. We don’t care about doing an event, we want to start processes that do leave a track. Even moving one single person’s life path by one millimeter would mean that we succeeded.

Camilla Colicchio What are Milano Mediterranea’s next steps?

Anna Serlenga Over the short term, two artistic residencies: Soukaina Abrour and Houssem Ben Rabia, and our festival named Twiza is taking place in June.

Rabii Brahim We’re also starting an experimental project in San Siro, a different neighborhood that has similar features to Giambellino, the neighborhood we work in.

Anna Serlenga In the near future, we would like to test our initiative on a larger scale, on other backgrounds. Of course, we can’t be everywhere at the same time and in the same way, but we can share practices with people who live in other territories and communities. We would like to establish a network of realities that are similar to ours. Nomadism has paid off for now, but in the longer term maybe Milano Mediterranea will get a house. Maybe it will be a ship, or a boat, or a van, we’ll see.