I have not yet had a chance to relate the week [Nadia] and I just spent hanging out in Matera. It was a real pleasure to actually see a living, functioning unMonastery after almost 20 months since concept. There are plenty of glitches, but glitches were budgeted for, and overall I think it is working very well. I hope to have time for deeper reflections in the coming future.
One thing that is very clear looking at the unMonastery Matera from my vantage point is that starting an unMonastery is venturing into the unknown unknown. unMonasterians simply have to make it up as they go; there is no telling where the next glitch is going to come from. Things that ājust happenā turn out to be a tremendous boon (everyone was super-impressed with [elf Pavlik]'s open data program); others that are rolled out thoughtfully and with the best intentions turn sour.
Hereās a small incident that brought this home to me. On grandopening day, unMonasterians put up a big āWelcomeā sign (shown below). This was appreciated, but when they did not take it down the day after, I am told, people started to moan. My source for this is Paolo, MT2019ās director: and I believe him, because Materans are very particular about the visual consistency of their city. Things like colors of the shutters are heavily regulated; satellite dishes and even solar panels are forbidden on aesthetic grounds; people hate a concrete bridge recently built in the Sassi to allow people with reduced mobility some access, however limited. This sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but is by no means limited to Matera: Italy is a country in which environmentalists oppose wind turbines because "they deface the landscape ā there was a heated discussion on this on the Matera 2019 online community, and I had to back off when one of the participants stated ātheyāll have to kill himā to install turbines in the Parco della Murgia!
Different aesthetic preferences per se are not generally divisive, but in the case of an unMonastery ā manned as it is by people from outside the area ā they can mean two things, not mutually exclusive:
- "we are here now, and we have a right to look the way we like, even if you don't like it."
- "we are similar to [some other group that happens to have a similar aesthetic interface]"
The first statement is self-explanatory. The second needs to be qualified: in the Materan context (and the Italian context in general) this sort of aesthetics typically connotes squat spaces ā there is one in Matera, a stoneās throw from the unMonastery, called Le Fucine dellāEco. The unMonastery is most definitely not a squat ā we fought hard to build a social role for unMonasterians as community troubleshooters, for the very good reason that if the unMonastery is not perceived as serving the community nobody will talk to it, and it will soon wither and die.
So I am curious: is Paolo right here? is the unMonasteryās visual identity serving it purpose as a smooth intrface withthe local community? What do [Rita O], [antonioelettrico], [andrea.paoletti] and the other Materans in the group think?