Per Esempio, in collaboration with WeWorld foundation, from 2014 to 2018, coordinated Frequenza 200 project, an intervention to combat early school leaving, aimed at children and young people in the Borgo Vecchio neighbourhood, an area of the city that presents serious economic hardship, a very high unemployment rate and a strong educational emergency.
In 2014, in parallel with the school support activities, the Arteca and Per Esempio Onlus associations, together with Ema Jons – an artist from Como – started a process of redevelopment of the neighborhood through the creation of various murals and paintings which slowly began to appear among the alleys and views of the neighborhood. The idea is to transpose the drawings and dreams of the neighborhood children onto the facades and walls of their own homes with the aim of activating a process of true participation and stimulating the idea of a possible re-appropriation of one’s spaces.
Within this panorama, in 2015, from the meeting between the associations Per Esempio Onlus and Push, BORGO VECCHIO FACTORY was born, a crowdfunding project which aims to raise the needed amount to bring many other artists from Italy and Europe and increase the artistic works and wall paintings that today represent that open-air museum that anyone can visit in the alleys of the Borgo Vecchio. The success of crowdfunding which in less than 60 days exceeded 130% of its intended objective, clearly finds its great boost in the involvement of the entire community which has taken action to make the dreams of those many children who are eager to give color to their neighborhood possible.
Drawing and art, used through non-formal intervention methodologies, become in this small but important experience of ours a very powerful tool for growth, capable of generating a very strong visual as well as social impact and opening up scenarios of “possible change” where static and hardship seem to reign supreme.
