I wake up and:
Be independent.
Think about your life.
Be successful (?)
Your needs first.
I fall asleep and dream:
Communities have always fascinated and frightened me at the same time. People who come together with common goals. People who go through sometimes long and complicated processes together. People who share languages and rituals. What is it that makes a group of people a community?
My first community was probably my school class. The second, as is often the case in Italy, was the church. Two communities that, in any case, I had not really chosen. I could only connect on an individual level with the people who were present in my schooling, as we had no collective way of going through education. What mattered in the end was my grade, and no one else's. And the catechism back in 2000, for a queer person like me, did not hold much of a sense of belonging to the Catholic culture of the time. If nothing else, it was an experience that made me feel intimidated by group experiences.
It was theatre, beloved theatre, that made me feel part of a group for the first time in my life, when I was eleven years old. I saw common goals, experiences created, shared languages. The ritual of being on a stage together, of trepidation before entering, of releasing adrenalin once finished. A lot of sharing with these groups, but also a lot of suffering when, for one reason or another, they split up. And so many groups I went through, but never stayed. Always looking for something more stable: against the tide?
I have always, and perhaps continue even now, to complain about the transitory nature of groups. Of how much I struggle to find meaning and space in the perspective of a group that is temporary. Why do we stay together if we know it will end? But then, another set of questions crowds my head:
What will end?
Won't it end anyway?
What does stable mean and what does temporary mean?
What remains with something stable?
What remains with something temporary, and how is it different from something permanent?
These questions I keep dreaming about, I keep suffering them, I keep chewing on them.
In the meantime, I can tell you that in this festival we try to build a temporary community. What does it mean? We try to be together in the best possible way. We try to traverse the space-time of the festival in a collective way, we try to create shared languages, we try to experiment with new rituals and support each other as if we were truly a community that is meant to last, even if in this reality it only lasts a week. What remains of this community? It is probably the ashes of the bonfire, and something that is outside the space-time of the festival. What remains for me is the courage to defend myself from the systemic persuasions that nag at me when I wake up from this beautiful dream that is the Alt-Shift festival.
- Carlo Sella