I participated in the Ethical Fashion Hackathon organized by the Ethical Fashion Initiative on May 2020, where I had the honor of being part of one of the teams selected with a project focused on Cultural Intellectual Property led by the lawyer Monica Moisin.
In the process of the Hackathon I was able to take the pulse of a worldwide spread symptomatology that I felt personally involved with as Human Being. After that, I spent months working on devising a project where I could contribute with my two cents to the change towards a more respectful and sustainable way of life. The territory where I focused was on rethinking the way of generating situated knowledge to be activated locally, because there is a lot of value lost in the global-systematized-productive conception of the world. I think it can be useful to slow down and rethink from the inner complexity and find ways we could live together with.
Three months later I put it on hold because I submitted a grant application with this project (un-commons) and a EU grant brought me the opportunity to acquire experience exploring the Montessori method in Paris, awaking my interest about other contemporary educational methods and schools.
un-commons is a platform that will connect creative minds with the goal of building a community, based on more than the sum of the individuals that make it, that can communicate with other communities to promote a way towards sustainable change. The point of departure of the project was the debate about the cultural influence of fashion in society, due to its universal presence in western cultural constructs and its capability of showing the symptomatology of the economic system distortions, as well as its reach to a large portion of the population. Right now, the idea is rethink little by little from all those “systems-structures” and “world global conceptions” and propose alternatives in common.
In a world where speed, institutionalized knowledge and the lack of attention to sensibility are dominating, un-commons proposes a different paradigm based on dialogue and slow interactions among small, selected communities of people with a willingness for change.
The basis of the project are a series of events, in various formats, where topics will be debated across disciplines while the process is documented by an external, who does not take part in the process, and later shared with a larger community through different channels, including a by-annual publication.
un-commons goal is to stimulate change towards sustainability through dialogue and to create extended thinking from local communities with members of diverse, transversal backgrounds, impacting people on three different levels: from participants to its Gatherings, to people reached through word of mouth to a larger public impacted by un-commons publications and by the actions of the communities.
The project builds on top of existing ones, which can be divided in two main groups: Specific Inspirational Projects and Spaces for education, creation and cultural dissemination. Both groups contribute to the concept of un-commons, which tries to overcome some of the time-space limitation by proposing a decentralized project which will organize local events all over the world while at the same documenting the process and sharing it through both printed and digital media.
un-commons will be constituted as a non-profit initiative which will self-sustain through donations, sales of magazines and tickets to its Annual Event and community memberships fees.
*Business Plan available on request