Abstract

How can community-based artistic practices contribute to transforming the pedagogical experience into a dimension of mutual trust and reciprocal care? South of Imagination by artist Valerio Rocco Orlando and Nomas expands these issues into a broader analysis on education as an emotional, experiential, and intellectual manufact encouraging society towards self-reflective transformation. Against a background of Europeanization and Westernization of education, this project aims at establishing an informal educational experience in Matera, Southern Italy. While re-imagining learning and nourishing socialization from a southern cultural horizon, such inclusive and participative pedagogical research pollinates and cultivates self-reflective education capable to create social space for subjectivity, hybridity, pluralism, mobility, and otherness by involving artist-based communities located in Albania, Morocco, Egypt. The study intends to trace the theoretical framework that has inspired the above-mentioned objectives of the project through the critical thought in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South and Antonio Gramsci’s Southern Question. As the empirical research is still ongoing, the study will also analyze the role of social theory, both as a practice and as an episteme, in de-colonizing and de-modernizing its potential hegemonic apparatus.