Three surprising results at the end of a week booked at the last minute.
After Ferragosto I left for a week in Contile di Varsi, for National Freire Week: a charming mountain spot, more than twenty people, a week co-managed together, phone off for lack of signal. Many lessons, and an information blackout that turned out to be deeply restorative.
Paulo Freire’s method, for those unfamiliar with it, is about the raising of consciousness — “conscientization” — of oppressed peoples or groups, and their empowerment to find solutions to their most pressing problems together. In short, the pedagogy of the oppressed.
During National Week we first of all freed our hands. All participants shared every task needed to co-manage the event, including cooking and cleaning. We also committed to leaving the Contile community with a good memory of us, doing small maintenance work on the town’s public furnishings, much appreciated by the few residents of the village.
Some lessons surprised me, and I’m bringing them home in CàNoVa’s basket of fruits, in Colgrande.
Despite my difficulties with “rapid socializing,” co-managing the event and the constant communication among participants let us apply the Freire method from day one, directly on our own personal and social themes — leading me to some surprising conclusions about the “time” factor in digital society (more to follow…).
The second: it’s possible to organize an exchange rich in human value (teaching, shared work, collaboration, creativity, fun, knowledge, games…) without it necessarily requiring a significant economic cost behind it. A true masterclass in “Do More with Less,” which I’ll carry over into how we organize CàNoVa’s courses, seminars, and gatherings: the human value exchanged will be far greater than the “cost” of the event — the opposite of pursuing profit alone.
The moment of returning to media news and going back online after a week was the most emotionally striking. For months now the news has centered on rising military spending and production in Europe, civilian deaths around Israel, the war in Ukraine, the war on migrants. The digital world increasingly infested with advertising, influencers, trolls, fake news, and tools of mass distraction and control.
On the way home, my mind inevitably ran to the values of the generation before mine: resistance and liberation from oppression.
I return to Colgrande more convinced than ever of the importance of putting into practice — each of us in our own small sphere — the beautiful original Italian Constitution and its 12 founding principles. This is what we do at Colgrande.