Per ‘uscire dalla confusione’: attivarsi tra quotidianità e creatività

The immigration phenomenon of the last thirty years in Italy has promulgated distorted narratives that fuel forms of intolerance, racism and xenophobia towards persons who land on the Italian coasts in search of a better life. This essay, bearing in mind the broader national and global dynamics, focuses on the Veronese context by describing the path of a project involving the University of Verona, local partners and some young asylum seekers from West Africa with sartorial skills, and a Kurdish artist. The research project stems from the need, felt as pressing in the historical and political framework we are living through, to restore the centrality and narrative capacity to refugees’ individual experiences, namely to take their history away from the media’s sweeping generalizations in order to return it to the subjective dimension, where the visions of the world and the knowledge embedded in the preceding life path might become tools for social inclusion and recognition in the arrival countries. The choice decided upon was that of bringing the anthropological gaze and creative process into a dialogue by shaping the artifact-blankets crafting into an articulated ‘doing together’, and thus configuring it as a moment for reflecting upon the complex question of ‘wounds’ – material and immaterial – regarding the migration journey and present everyday life. The artifact-blankets along with ethnographic and visual materials have been displayed in an exhibition. The narrative style that the two authors have deliberately chosen for this essay is the outcome of negotiations, which makes it a hybrid writing.