Since September 2016, the 21 July Association, along with other groups in the Tor Bella Monaca area, have been entrusted by the city of Rome to manage the “Ex Fienile” Center, provided to the neighborhood as an educational and cultural center for the area.
The Amarò Foro project offers Rom and non-Rom minors from the area and the nearby shanty town of Salone two artistic workshops as opportunities for meetings and exchanges to alleviate the strong social tensions and disarm the conflicts present among the inhabitants of the neighborhood. A group of educators, cultural mediators, artists and specially trained art educators carry out street education and workshops in break dancing and music at the Ex Fienile four afternoons a week. In particular for the older kids (11-13 years) the workshop focuses on breakdance and on the values of integration promoted by the hip-hop culture, with meetings with special guests (ballerinas, musicians, singers, composers and writers) to encourage the young people to try out new artistic languages, and a final performance. Also, the children and youth involved in the project visit the city of Rome to get to know and “conquer” their own city, with its historical-artistic wealth to which they do not normally have access.
The project undertakes a “pedagogy of citizenship” centering on minors and adolescents, who experience inequality, exclusion and marginalization in the Rom camps and the youth living in extreme marginalization in the Tor Bella Monaca area. The youth undertake individual and group studies for citizenship, learning about rules respecting others, creative and emotional expression through art, self-awareness and acceptance of themselves and others as individuals wishing to be free to dream and be happy.
In previous years the project involved Rom children through artistic activities (music, dance and theatre) living in informal camps and an equipped village in Rome, along with primary and secondary students in the outskirts of the capital in order to foster their integration and fight against the scholastic dispersion of Rom minors.
