Text by Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli
Following an initial visual assembly in Venice with students from the Liceo Artistico Statale, Nika Dubrovsky and Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli led a two-day discussion at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi as part of the Festival dei Matti. Participants—including audience members, organizers, and presenters—collaboratively reimagined a città della cura, city of care, weaving dialogues in both English and Italian and channeling the weekend’s enthusiasm, reflections, and ideas into this shared visual assembly.
Two tablecloths were laid out on opposite ends of the stage—one representing a dystopian vision of care, the other a utopian one. Unlike in English, the Italian word cura encompasses both cure and care, carrying both the threat of downward spirals of medicalization and the potential for collective healing.
Unsurprisingly, the dystopian reflections mirrored many of today’s systems, where each one of us is isolated to our private spaces, alienated, in a world where everything, beginning with the very food we eat, is contaminated by our own poisons, broken, chasing the newest remedy until we are pushed through hospital departments like circles of Dante’s Hell, crushed, with the palliative illusion of temporary cures, but in reality left in pieces. “A volte ci curiamo ma non ci curiamo davvero”, “Sometimes we cure/care for ourselves, but we don’t truly cure/care for ourselves”, noted Valentina Ruzzi, one of the Festival’s organizers.
On the other tablecloth, a different vision emerged—one not centered on cures but on mutual care and well-being. Without prompting, participants envisioned a society where care takes priority over capitalist commitments. While utopian in vision, the solutions were all very simple things, grounded in community organizing (listening to each other, open-doors policies across public spaces, skill sharing, bartering, food gardens, flower yards) – care for oneself, other people and the environment all part of the same picture.
The following day, participants gathered as a single group to reflect on the limits and potentials of both visions. How do we confront adversity, internal tensions, and external threats? Anna Poma, the Festival’s founder, shared a past experience where a group she was part of set up free zones to vent and share anger – not an erasure of conflict but an acknowledgement of the need for conflict. Miguel Benasayag, philosopher and member of the Festival, warned against the deadly complacency of comfort and ‘tolerance’ for conflict; in reality, we are constantly swinging back and forth between utopia and dystopia, and conflict is a part of the human experience.
Everyone agreed that it was necessary to join the two tablecloths – but how to build a bridge between radically different dimensions? The dominant, contemporary dystopia is pervasive and ever-present, yet small bolle di utopia, bubbles of utopia, keep appearing everywhere. An activist from last year’s Ca’ Foscari University occupation for divestment from Israeli military affairs recalled the fragile yet intense communal life during those two months of resistance.
Yet, do these bubbles of utopia really need to be protected? Perhaps the opposite is true: their persistent emergence, despite repression, suggests that the real bubble is the dystopia we inhabit, a dystopia that needs the comfortable violence of institutions to enforce its own survival. As these two days showed to all participants, we really have the power to move us all closer to each other, to stretch the rules of how we live together, and to find care within our relationships – conflicts included.