Promoting inclusion through culture, the Madre of Naples for the kids of Scampia

Two projects involving young people from the city's troubled neighborhoods, starting with Scampia. The Madre in Naples is opening up to social inclusion through culture.
The museum of contemporary art of the Campania Region will be busy during the summer months with two initiatives born from an idea by Laura Valente, president of the Donnaregina foundation, on which the Madre depends. The first is a summer factory, which is divided into several moments. Inside the rooms of the museum, some works by Felice Pignataro, the most prolific muralist in the world and pioneer of the social redemption of the last, will be hosted until September 3. For the first time, a museum brings together a selection of Pignataro, including the famous papier-mâché mask of San Ghetto Martire-Saint Protector of the Suburbs and the Revolutionary Duck. The Felice@Madre project is organized in collaboration with the Gridas social center of Scampia and also includes educational and training activities and an original performance. "To break down the internal walls, the ideological ones - explains Valente - paradoxically we will build a real one, the fourth wall of the Madre, which will be muralized by the kids who will participate in the campus". This final moment will be preceded by three workshops aimed at children between 7 and 17 years old and created by the associations SkartAbelliamo and BandaBaleno and the muralist artist RARO. The second project will focus on the Vele di Scampia. The American artist Cecile B. Evans, author of Amos' World, will reflect on the meaning of "feeling at home" with 15 children from families who will have to move from the Vele to the new buildings constructed in view of the demolition of three of the four buildings. The protagonists will be invited to experience the museum in an interactive and experimental way to work on the individual experience of "home".
“It is a work of social inclusion that Madre has never done before – Valente underlines – a platform that for three years will bring artists and cultural operators to the museum to work with kids from difficult neighborhoods, because we think that through art we can make a difference”. The director Andrea Viliani is enthusiastic about this “new path that will characterize our activity for the future, with the intent of bringing Madre into every home and welcoming the energies and daily needs even of those who have never been here”.