7 October 2022
The game is finally on and the first patrol is looking at the Aspromonte peak on the other side of the strait. With a big although. In fact, we all would have prefered the residency starting with Edgeryders’ favourite speculative fiction writer @yudhanjaya here with us.
Unluckily, starting the procedure of getting a visa for EU in March this year has not been timely enough to get Yudha at least an appointment at the Italian embassy in Colombo yet.
Hopefully, that will change in the near future and we can think of organising a residency/something 2.0 somewhere in the near future.
Buon viso a cattivo gioco as they say here, we decided to go on with the bigger part of the crowd in Messina and Yudhanjaya pulling the creative strings remotely.
The three goals of the residency are to a) start a novel, b) strategize, c) communicate - check here for details.
The works have officially started this morning in the Messina’s Cinema Apollo where @alberto and I presented the work done in the last two years on Witness to the students of three Messina high schools (artistic, design, classical) - program here - together with Anita, Lucrezia and Antonella from FdCM (ping @giacomo.pinaffo too), @michi1 and @marcolok who both talked about their work on the illustrations.
There were 70+ kids from Basile, Verona-Trento and La Farina, who followed the presentations and engaged in discussions with keen interest.
The challenge to the kids in the following days is to get to know Witness, think about the concepts, propose new ideas, stories, characters, illustrations, designs, music (my personal fav would be a hip hop piece in thick Sicilian on this) or to contribute to Witnesspedia itself.
To facilitate the non English speakers, we opened the W section in Italian.
The Town by The Sea testing session proposal produced a chain reaction of interest
(@matteo_uguzzoni! ping also @nadia, @marina) and their moderators will work on organising the groups of six for the test rides (not necessarily next week).
@hugi is arriving tomorrow (have a safe trip!)
Alberto in action
Distributing the questions to the participants
One of the participants working on the questions
Well, you know… Sicily
