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NONTURISMO

"Non-tourist" guides written by local communities through participatory pathways to redefine the identity of places

YEAR
2018 – ongoing

ROLE
Concept and curatorship

CATEGORY
Regeneration of places

SITE
nonturismo.org

2030 GOALS

AWARDS

Nonturismo is a way of understanding the encounter between a community and those from outside: nonturists seek an intimate and authentic relationship with an area, the community rediscovers its identity through a collective narrative.

There are places in Italy undergoing transformation because they are decentralized in remote areas or, on the contrary, overwhelmed by mass tourism flows. There are people moved by a desire to integrate themselves into the territory they are exploring, people who experience travel not simply as the consumption of a pleasure, but the experience of an encounter.

Activating territories with community editorial board

The instrument of this collective process is the community redaction, where artists, historians, economists, sociologists, botanists, carry out short residencies with the community, helping it to re-appropriate a common memory heritage, to investigate its present and build new future imaginaries.
The editorial process consists of a series of meetings coordinated by a partner from within the territory or community, in which inhabitants and incursors participate, stimulating the transformation of contents into a multi-voice storytelling, made up of words and images, far from the idea of a single author.

It is not possible to know what a nontourist guide will look like from the beginning. Its form and content are defined as it goes along, according to the spirit of the place. However, every guide cannot lack some basic elements, which define its backbone:

GENIUS LOCI: Historical, traditional, folkloric, as well as naturalistic elements that have contributed to the identity of the place.

EMERGENCIES: That which is on the surface, which is coming to the surface-positive and negative.

VISIONS: More or less utopian projections of what will be the land told fifty years from now.

A plural journey to discover Ussita, the village in the Sibillini Mountains hit by the 2016 earthquake. A guidebook as mobile as the land it narrates: from the movement of the earth shaken by the earthquake, to a community in motion, guiding the traveler to self-discovery through a “seismic” narrative, in which text and images speak at once of the old, the new and the imaginary.

The traveler is offered two narrative itineraries designed under the supervision of C.A.S.A. – Cosa Accade Se Abitiamo.

Vivere qui, collects residents’ stories on 8 routes and engages the traveler in the life of the Hussite community, guiding them in an urban/naturalistic exploration of the places that characterize the new post-earthquake daily life and history of the area.

From the Dalla valle alle vette, divided into 4 parts, is an ascent from the valley floor to Mount Bove, belonging to the northern part of the Sibillini mountain range and a symbol of the territory, a spiritual experience narrated by writer Alessandro Chiappanuvoli in which the traveler’s imagination is the indispensable element to give substance to the suggestions narrated. Some of the points of interest touched by the routes overlap, leaving the traveler free to rewrite his or her own route.

There are places in Bologna that still resist the aesthetics of tourism: they are not photogenic, they are not decorous, they do not display the Unesco seal and they do not sell tortellini at 35 euros a kilo. And yet, precisely because they resist, they best express the city’s genius loci, its rebellious attitude. Places where unexpected plants grow, where culture changes the use of space, where you can live even without a home, where the night belongs to everyone and everyone. This guide collects them in four routes thanks to the work of three ‘community editors’, that is, people who live Bologna and do not resign themselves to contemplating it as it turns into its postcard’ (Wu Ming 2)

The theme around which the three community editorial offices were activated for the Bologna guide is resistance, a word strongly linked to Bologna’s historical and social identity, which the editorial offices have reinterpreted according to their own sensitivity, producing three itineraries:

  • the resistance of biodiversity in peripheral paths
  • the resistance of the housing of the homeless
  • the resistance of small cultural centres

The guide closes with an extra itinerary, Cities by Night, a map and a podcast by artist Valentina Medda on women’s perception of Bologna by night.

For Ancona’s Nonturismo guide, between March and July 2023, Ancona inhabitants will be engaged in a participatory journey to tell the story of their city to those who travel as “nontourists”. Three community editorial boards led by trainer Tommaso Sorichetti, bookseller Simona Rossi and Museo Tattile Statale Omero coordinator Annalisa Trasatti, with Wu Ming 2 curatorship, will tell stories about certain places in Ancona, according to a “spirit of place” chosen during a collective co-design workshop.

Thinking of the city as a living being: online the results of the public event in which curator and inhabitants co-designed the theme of Ancona’s Nonturismo guide.

Nonturismo Ancona: what’s going on in the community editorials? an in-depth look at the first places mapped by the three community editorials groups for the collaborative writing of the Ancona Nonturismo guide.

Arcevia’s Nonturismo guide is the result of a collective process aimed at exploring and telling the territory that started in September 2023, when more than sixty inhabitants participated in a workshop to create the spirit of the place, drawing Arcevia as if it were a living being.

Between October and November 2023, the project moved on into community editorial boards: workshops in which people who live, or lived, between Arcevia and its Castelli met to tell each other what unites them and to redefine the meaning of living in this place. With the help of Ciro Saltarelli, Lucio Tribellini, and Angelo Verdini, anthropologists Brenda Benaglia and Eleonora Adorni involved about 30 inhabitants and led the choral narrative of Arcevia as a galactic city. At the same time, a “junior” community editorial team activated by teachers Andrea Bomprezzi and Elena Motisi with 3 classes of the Istituto Comprensivo Statale di Arcevia conducted a similar work of choral narration of the territory, following the Nonturismo for Kids methodology on emotional geography developed by Sineglossa.

The guide is accompanied by an itinerary on the stories of places between the real and the fantastic, written by Wu Ming 2, and a visual narration by illustrator Edoardo Massa.

Watch the video of the project carried out in Bologna in 2022.

Read the interview with Federico Bomba about Nonturism on La Freccia, Trenitalia’s in-depth monthly magazine, the article (in French) in Culture & Démocratie magazine, and Wu Ming 2’s article on Bologna’s nontourism guide for the blog Giap. the article in the scientific journal Revista de Estudios Empresariales written by Professor Paola de Salvo (University of Perugia, Italy).

Shop now the guides on Ussita. Monti SibilliniBologna, Ancona, Arcevia.

Listen to the audio documentary by journalist Sara Sartori on how earthquake affected tourism models in mountain area, through voices from Ussita inhabitants and local municipality.

Download the Nonturismo for kids methodology to educate adolescents to practice key active citizenship skills through the creation of an emotional geography itinerary.

Nonturismo is a project conceived by Sineglossa and Riverrun and a series published by Ediciclo.

The Ussita guide is produced by Sineglossa with the collaboration of C.A.S.A. – Cosa Accade Se Abitiamo as part of the “Once App On A Time” project, funded by the Department of Youth and National Civil Service.

The Bologna guide is produced by Sineglossa in collaboration with Piazza Grande, Kilowatt, Yoda, ITACA, Tatanka, with the support of Comune di Bologna, Lo Stato Dei Luoghi, Orchestra Senza Spine. The project is funded by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture with Creative Living Lab Call for Proposals III edition, with the contribution of Fondazione del Monte.

The Ancona guide is part of Sistema, an initiative launched by the City of Ancona, in collaboration with Parco del Conero, CNR-IRBIM, CSV Marche Ets, Polo9, Casa delle Culture – il Pungitopo, Hort, Scholanova di Varano, with the support of Fondazione Cariverona.

The Arcevia guide is a project curated by Sineglossa, in collaboration with the Municipality of Arcevia, Clio ’92 – Association of Teachers and Researchers on the Didactics of History, Parco Museo Minerario delle Miniere di Zolfo delle Marche e dell’Emilia Romagna, Istituto Comprensivo Statale di Arcevia, Associazione Turistica Pro Loco Arcevia, Unione dei Comuni – Le Terre della Marca Senone, Unione Montana dell’Esino Frasassi. The project was realized thanks to the support of the Cariverona Foundation through the Nuovo Sviluppo program.

The Nonturismo Appennino Bolognese guidebook is edited by Sineglossa in collaboration with Unione dei Comuni dell’Appennino Bolognese, with the support of EIT Urban Mobility through the EIT NEB Enhance call of the EIT Community New European Bauhaus. EIT Urban Mobility is supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a European Union body.