On 27 January 1999, a group of youths made up of immigrants, casual and jobless workers, occupied the Cinema Rialto, an abandoned and run-down building belonging to the Municipality of Rome, situated in via IV Novembre. There they started up the most centrally located community centre in Rome. From the very beginning, it was an "anomalous" occupation, whose purpose was to develop a space that was different from previous experiences. Refusing the restrictions of proven formulas, and after daily experimenting for a year and two months, they came up with a blend of different programmes, both particular and specific, based on art, culture, rights and politics.

This experience was to be the origin of the cultural association Rialtoccupato, which in the month of March 2000 was allotted a portion of the monumental complex of S. Ambrogio alla Massima, where the ex-ghetto is still located.

Here evolves this "non state-owned public area": a place where people can produce culture, exchange knowledge and experience other forms of expression, from music to theatre exploration, to visual arts. It is an autonomous place where people can express lost and subjugated skills and creativity, thus redeeming them from playing an economic role and adopting them as resources to be used dynamically in society. In so doing, that mechanism that demands an official version of knowledge and intelligence, that decides who may authorize and distribute a version and who may not, is broken. Therefore, the constant pursuit of interrelations with the city raises the awareness of a deep crisis of traditional, cultural places that are unable to break into contemporary, contaminated forms of art and reality or to face the newly-arisen needs and wishes of a new "public" made up of complex users no longer definable into distinct categories.

The Rialtosantambrogio thus develops a project of cultural politics, completely open to all contemporary artistic forms of expression, through an agenda of events ranging from theater, to music, to visual arts, becoming a reference point in Italy for all those artistic experiences that are "unconventional" and based on research.

English translation by
ITALIA TRADUZIONI
www.italiatraduzioni.com