Urban Islands – Spaces for Students

Studenti dell’Università Statale di Milano with Istituto Confucio dell’Università degli Studi di Milano, Slide e Unopiù

Cortile della Ghiacciaia - Università degli Studi di Milano

In a choral combination of voices and experiences of the students of the State University, the installations of Urban Islands. Spaces for Students represent a multifaceted sequence of interpretations of already familiar, experienced, imagined but also endured spaces. Ambivalent spaces, capable of opening to participation or closing, in isolation.

Hosted in the Cortile della Ghiacciaia – whose glass dome will be lit from below with an intermittent beam, representing the beating heart of the University – the works are organized in two thematic clusters: emotional spaces and spaces of isolation.

The first grouping includes Immersive Spaces, multimedia narratives based on texts by a group of students to explore through special visors, and the Emotional Maps, projections that establish a dialogue with paper maps sketched on the historic architecture of the courtyard to redesign a familiar but seldom represented topography.

These ideally open places are contrasted by others whose dimension is that of the ‘non-chosen’ space, which nevertheless seeks (and finds) a way of being overcome by sharing: the Spaces of Care, of the Youth Project of the National Cancer Institute, and “La Statale al Bekka,” a narrative of closed areas that reopen in the creative encounter between the young inhabitants of the Istituto Penale Minorile Cesare Beccaria, a juvenile detention center, and the students of the State University.