Suburb View: Milanese students’ experience with artist Natalia Saurin
Over the coming weeks, until 14 June, some of the main streets of Rome and Milan will be filled with video works from the Suburb View project, created in collaboration with Urban Vision Group. Pupils from the Confalonieri De Chirico (Rome) and Galilei-Luxemburg (Milan) secondary schools have transformed the anniversary of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale into digital projects exploring evolution, connection, creativity and the future, displayed on Urban Vision’s video walls [see the news item Urban visions for the right to knowledge].
Having interviewed the artist Giacomo Lion, who mentored the young Romans [see Taking a stand with technology], we now speak with Natalia Saurin, who worked alongside the Milanese students. The Italian-Argentinian artist uses photography, video and installation to create works in which she explores themes such as emotions, but also gender-based violence and the relationship between women and society, investigating the connection between myth and everyday life. From her experience with the young people, she was able to appreciate the process of maturation that led them to quickly learn how to work in a group, respecting ideas and allowing them to come together in a truly shared project.
What is the new vision of urban space and community that emerges from these works?
At the start of our sessions, I showed the young people a series of projects by contemporary artists who have engaged with the urban context, and we also looked at how advertising has been changing in recent years. It was a way of sparking their curiosity and gaining a broader perspective on the subject at hand; I believe historical contextualisation is very important.
What were the biggest technical or creative challenges you saw the young people facing?
The biggest challenge for the young people was finding a common narrative thread and, at the same time, learning to truly work as a team. During the sessions, a number of ideas and insights emerged which, little by little, coalesced into a shared outcome. I believe this was the most interesting part: moving from an individual to a collective dimension, learning to engage with one another and build something together. It was a journey of exploration rather than mere technical production, and seeing a shared narrative emerge from so many different perspectives was perhaps the workshop’s most significant achievement.
In this case, technology became a bridge, lending itself to the story of the local area – how was this possible?
We started by working with a tool that all the young people already had in their hands every day: the mobile phone. Each of us has now “integrated” this incredibly powerful digital tool into our daily lives, but we often use it in the same way, automatically and quickly. In the project, we tried to turn this approach on its head: the phone was not used merely to consume images, but to create them with intention. It is not just the technique that makes the difference: a tool, on its own, is not enough. What matters is the’intention with which it is used, the ability to transform it into a means of expression, connection and listening.
We have therefore overturned the narrative that sees young people as passive consumers of technology. Here, instead, they have become creators. What was the most surprising and ‘outside the box’ idea or proposal to emerge over these past few months?
What surprised me most is that the initial ideas that emerged from the young people were mainly linked to nature. We adults often tend to see teenagers as passive users of technology and social media, always glued to a screen, but I believe that in reality there is also a strong need within them to reconnect with a different kind of rhythm: the biological, slow and sensory rhythm of nature.
We tried to use technology to experiment, make mistakes, observe, and imagine new possibilities. I believe this approach allowed them to feel more creatively free and to experience technology not as a performance or passive consumption, but as a space for discovery and connection.
