Neighbourhood Communities of Care

Based in Turin, northern Italy, Vittoria Lombardi describes herself as a multifaceted professional in the cultural sector. Balancing roles as a project designer, project manager, curator, and producer, she prefers the broader label of “cultural practitioner” to capture the diversity of her work. Her passion lies in exploring how creativity and the arts—mainly performing arts—can spark public and political debate, foster collaboration, and build bridges between and within communities.

“The performing arts are the medium I feel most at home with,” says Lombardi. “They hold immense potential to shape togetherness and strengthen bonds across diverse groups.” Her approach is deeply rooted in a commitment to long-term social impact, a perspective she partly attributes to her role as a mother. She notes that parenthood has profoundly influenced her professional ethos, reinforcing her focus on projects that promote social responsibility and collective well-being.

Vittoria is also a key member of Milano Mediterranea, a creative organisation co-founded by Anna Cerlenga and Ravi Abraham. It has provided her with a collaborative space to pursue her vision of using creativity to address societal challenges. While her work extends beyond the organisation, she regards Milano Mediterranea as a central pillar of her professional identity. “I’ve found a platform here to share and nurture my passion alongside the team,” she reflects. “It’s a place that embodies the ideals I hold dear.”

Vittoria’s path into the intersection of cultural work, participatory processes, and political debate reflects a natural convergence of her academic background and practical experiences. Starting with a foundation in political science, where she focused on sustainable development and international relations, she was drawn early on to explore how she could apply participatory governance to real-world challenges. Her passion for these concepts deepened during her university years when she began working as an organiser and producer in artistic production.

While her academic studies introduced her to theories of participatory governance, her practical work in the arts provided the ideal ground for testing these ideas. “I started asking myself how the process of creating art could relate to the principles of participatory governance,” she explains. This line of inquiry aligned with her belief that while art cannot solve societal problems outright, it can illuminate them, sparking dialogue and new perspectives.

Vittoria credits her collaborations with artistic collectives as pivotal in shaping her methodology. Among her most influential collaborators are Anna Serlenga and Ravi Abraham, who were engaged in participatory art projects between Tunisia and Milan long before founding Milano Mediterranea. These partnerships enabled her to experiment with innovative forms of artistic production and participatory processes, creating space for meaningful exchanges about art’s social and political dimensions.

Today, as a member of Milano Mediterranea, Vittoria works for a unique participatory arts organisation. Unlike traditional cultural centres, Milano Mediterranea operates without a fixed physical space, a deliberate choice that reflects its ethos of embedding creativity into everyday life. The organisation collaborates with a wide range of non-cultural spaces—such as florists, barbershops, and local NGOs—to integrate artistic processes into the fabric of communities.

“We wanted to avoid confining our work to a single location,” Vittoria explains. “Instead, we build networks of spaces that aren’t cultural centres in the traditional sense, but that can host and sustain creative processes. It’s about showing that creativity belongs to everyone and can happen anywhere.”

Through artist residencies and community-driven projects, Milano Mediterranea facilitates interactions between artists and individuals from diverse sectors, fostering surprising and meaningful collaborations. This approach reflects Vittoria’s goal to use creativity as a catalyst for social engagement and political discourse, encouraging communities to rethink their role in shaping the world around them.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation, The Neighbourhood Communities of Care (NCC) project is an international initiative designed to replicate and adapt the participatory, community-focused model pioneered by Milano Mediterranea in other urban contexts. It represents a bold experiment to test the adaptability of Milano Mediterranea’s model in diverse urban settings and to explore how participatory arts can address broader societal issues.

Started in the autumn of 2024, the project brings together three partners: Milano Mediterranea in Italy, Flats Festival in Budapest, Hungary, and Tapsberg Performative Forschung in Berlin, Germany.

The project’s primary aim is to foster connections between neighbourhoods in different cities while addressing social justice and transition themes. Leveraging Milano Mediterranea’s four years of experience, the project seeks to implement its community and territorial activation model in Budapest and Berlin. The key elements include:

• Artistic Neighbourhood Committees: These committees, composed of local residents, play a central role in the project. As in Milano Mediterranea, the committees are able to select artists and projects for residency programmes. The selection process will prioritise artistic quality, relevance to the local context, and alignment with the overarching social justice theme.
• Residency Programmes: Artists chosen by the neighbourhood committees in each city will participate in residencies designed to address issues of social justice and community transformation. The residencies aim to ground artistic practices in the realities of local communities, ensuring their relevance and impact.

The Artistic Neighbourhood Committees are formed through an inclusive and flexible process, aiming to reflect the diversity of the local community rather than relying on a formal selection mechanism. Here’s how the Committee works in Milano:

1. Open call for participation: The committee is open to all interested individuals from the neighbourhood. There is no formal vetting or selection, ensuring accessibility and inclusivity.
2. Multilingual and multichannel outreach: To engage a diverse audience, the organisation tailors its communication efforts to the multicultural realities of the area. For example:
   • Communications are translated into key languages spoken locally, such as Arabic, Wolof, Chinese, and Romani.
   • Flyers are designed and distributed creatively, including at local markets, alongside social media posts in Italian and English.
3. Adapting through feedback: The organisation refines its outreach methods based on community feedback and lessons learned. For instance, translating materials into Romani proved less effective, as Romani is primarily an oral language. This discovery led to adjustments in their communication strategy.
4. Reaching underrepresented groups: Special attention is given to engaging groups from the Mediterranean diaspora and other diasporic communities underrepresented in the Italian cultural sector. This focus ensures that the committee reflects a broad spectrum of cultural and social perspectives.
5. Creativity in engagement: By combining traditional methods like printed flyers with innovative, culturally aware approaches, the team has successfully connected with residents who might not be reached through digital or conventional channels.

This process fosters inclusivity and allows the organisation to evolve and grow through trial, error, and active learning, ensuring that the committee represents the local community’s diversity and interests. This model is expected to be adapted by the project’s partners for their contexts in Berlin and Budpaest.

The project employs a multifaceted approach to communicate with the local community—particularly young people, professionals in cultural and creative fields and residents—and engages a broad spectrum of residents, particularly those interested in the cultural and creative sectors. Here’s how they communicate:

1. Community-Based Meetings: Meetings are organised in accessible, familiar spaces like cafés, bicycle shops, and barber shops, creating an inviting and informal environment.
2. Open Calls: The team issues open calls for artistic residency programmes and neighbourhood committee participation, ensuring transparency and broad engagement.
3. Localised Outreach: Communications are adapted to the community, with efforts to spread information through printed flyers, translated materials, and personal exchanges of contact information.
4. Collaborative Planning: The project arranges a calendar of meetings where community members discuss artistic proposals and participate in the selection process, fostering collective decision-making.

The diversity of participants strengthens the committee by blending professional expertise with grassroots perspectives. While cultural professionals dominate, including residents outside the arts broadens the relevance and appeal of the project’s outcomes, ensuring it resonates across the community.

Participatory processes are deeply embedded in both the artist selection process and the implementation of residency projects. Here’s how they are integrated into the calls and the artistic selection:

1. Community-driven selection: The Artistic Neighbourhood Committee, composed of local residents, actively reviews and selectts artists. This ensures that the chosen proposals align with the needs and interests of the district.
2. Condition of engagement: The only strict requirement in the open call is that artists must engage the local community in their creative process. Proposals must demonstrate how they will adapt their project to the specific context and actively involve community members.
3. Flexibility in artistic language: The open calls welcome proposals from diverse disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, film, and performance. There are no constraints on the artistic medium. Still, projects must remain flexible, allowing room for community participation and local adaptation.

1. Pre-residency preparation: Each residency begins with a seven-day preparation period during which Milano Mediterranea introduces artists to the district’s history, context, and local networks. This co-design phase helps artists shape their proposals to fit the community’s specific needs and interests.
2. Collaborative design: Milano Mediterranea takes on a co-curatorial role, working with the artists to ensure their projects integrate participatory methods effectively. This includes building connections with local spaces and identifying key community stakeholders.
3. Flexibility in execution: Artists are encouraged to scale and adapt their initial ideas to engage the community meaningfully, using approaches that resonate with local dynamics.

This methodology ensures that the projects are artistically innovative, socially relevant, and rooted in the local context. Milano Mediterranea ensures that residencies foster collaboration, dialogue, and a sense of shared ownership over the creative outcomes by requiring community engagement and supporting artists throughout the process.

The project has faced several key challenges when working with the community, particularly in Milano’s Giambellino district. These include:

1. Fluctuating participation: Despite their efforts, participation in activities can be inconsistent. While sometimes the response is overwhelmingly positive, at other times it is not. This unpredictability in community engagement is one of the project’s ongoing challenges, highlighting that participation is not guaranteed and requires continuous effort.
2. Building and maintaining trust: Establishing trust within the community is a crucial aspect of the work, but it is an ongoing process. Even if trust is built initially, it must be carefully nurtured over time. This is particularly difficult in a district where residents may have had negative experiences with public institutions or external organisations, leading to scepticism or mistrust.
3. Tensions with public institutions: The Giambellino district is under scrutiny due to significant municipal investment, which creates tensions between local residents and public authorities. Many community members may have a distrustful relationship with public institutions, which complicates the project’s efforts to engage and collaborate. As a private, independent organisation, Milano Mediterranea has to navigate these tensions carefully while maintaining accountability to both the community and public institutions.

These challenges highlight the complexity of fostering meaningful, long-term engagement in a community, particularly in areas where trust and previous experiences with authorities may influence people’s willingness to participate.

According to Vittoria, the project has made a meaningful impact in several ways, mainly through fostering connections within the community. While acknowledging that four years may be too short a time to assess large-scale transformations, she points out that Milano Mediterranea has become recognised as a local actor in the neighbourhood. This recognition has led to greater integration within the community, even in areas they hadn’t initially reached.

One of the most notable impacts is the creation of spaces where people from very different backgrounds and age groups can come together. For example, older women from the neighbourhood and young students or professionals—who might typically seem distant in terms of lifestyles and habits—have been able to sit together around a table and enjoy shared experiences. This intergenerational and cross-cultural interaction is something Vittoria finds particularly rewarding, as it highlights the project’s ability to foster understanding and connection between diverse groups.

Although the project works with small groups rather than large crowds, the shift in how people engage with one another and the community is a key measure of success for the team. This gradual, relational change is viewed as a meaningful impact.

Written by Jose Rodriguez