Cantieri Meticci: Creating the Possible from the Margins

In March and April, Cantieri Meticci initiated its research for the European project Viable Unknowns through workshops with children, led by artistic director Pietro Floridia, illustrator Sara Pour, actors and trainers Marco Manfredi, Matteo Miucci and Younes El Bouzari. 

Cantieri Meticci creates artistic imaginaries in public and peripheral spaces, involving different communities through participatory theatre, visual arts and workshops. Their work fosters social connections, builds platforms for artistic expression and promotes active citizenship.

The concept developed by Cantieri Meticci for the Viable Unknowns performance centres on urban sustainability, inclusivity, and the experiences of marginalised communities. It addresses often overlooked issues such as irregular migration, the situation of children born in Italy to foreign parents, environmental injustice and gentrification. The project blends social research, education, and art to give voice to those living on the edges of urban society.

At the centre of the project are children and teenagers, many from Eritrea, Ivory Coast and Syria. Through weekly theatre and artistic workshops, Cantieri Meticci’s team try to explore themes of personal and collective identity. A key symbol in this process is the tree, used to reflect on roots, dreams, belonging and how to create a sense of belonging in migrant children. Young participants, especially those from suburban areas where green spaces have vanished, express a disconnection from nature, sparking discussions on environmental rights and exclusion. This connects directly to the challenges faced by children born in Italy who, in the absence of ius soli (birthright citizenship), must prove their citizenship upon turning 18. This legal threshold raises deeper questions around identity, access and the right to inhabit and shape the city.

The workshops led by Cantieri Meticci artists combine improvisation and storytelling, starting from the input provided by the children, their dreams, ideas and drawings, to generate symbolic reflections and unite art with civic engagement.

Through these reflections, a perception of nature emerged as something alien or even threatening. In their eyes, trees appear as lone survivors in a landscape dominated by concrete, and their "care" is often nothing more than a decorative illusion, a false attention that conceals neglect and exclusion. Together with them, the staff of Cantieri Meticci created a symbolic story beginning with a shared dream, the last tree falling on the eighteenth birthday of a migrant girl, to explore themes of uprootedness, denied citizenship, and truths obscured by an official discourse that disguises exploitation as culture. We learned to see what often goes unnoticed: that shade is a right, that a leaf is a sign of life and that the ground beneath our feet can breathe. Another crucial insight emerged by linking the fate of nature with that of subaltern peoples, particularly migrants.

The same gaze that destroys ecosystems is the one that silences entire communities. The artists drew inspiration from Malcolm Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology, which urges us to overcome the false separation between ecology and social justice: there can be no care for the Earth without addressing the wounds of colonialism. Thus, the uprooting of trees in working-class neighbourhoods becomes a metaphor for human uprooting. The struggles to breathe, to take root, to stay, are intertwined in a single thread: a struggle for a decolonial ecology that recognises the right to exist both for the African palm and the African child born in Italy. The workshop also became a space for poetic politicisation, where cracks in the urban landscape were seen as openings for new alliances. A mythology to be built with many voices, to inhabit our cities together. And differently. 

Nurtured by these visions, reflections, and shared imaginaries, Cantieri Meticci is weaving them into the script of a performance that aspires to give voice to these layered stories.