# Trasformatorio Lab 2023

Collaboration opportunity
composed for: Giuseppe Litera

What follows is the note you asked me after the talk we had today online.

## ABOUT
The only entity that is able to drive humanity along on a new path is a good story.

There are, in the realm of the arts, experts in finding, presenting, developing stories.

Trasformatorio has done research about human centric and art-lead innovation based on integrating tech and imagination into a strong local narrative.

Trasformatorio activity is for areas were communal, resilient and cooperative economic development is both possible and desirable (remote areas, natural reserves, marginal areas). These areas are both desirable and hard to live in, disregarded and vital to the cities below.

To minimise the risks of fire, landslide and flod for example the woods and mountains antropised since millenia and abandoned only few generations before have to be mantained.

We use arts to grow on the target territory a good story, a narrative of regeneration that speeks to the harts and mind of people living there and wanting to move there alike. We use arts to connect these territories again, to create prospects of circular and permanent culture.

What they miss are the sustainable financial structures.

Recently in many directions technological research has moved to design, implement and tests tools that might be useful on the ground to do so.
They are complex, hard to fit into the local story, they tend to exclude from the discourse exactly those persons that are necessary to implement and test these technological tools because are the active part of the inhabitants of the site.

We think you cannot build such economic experiments if not in a manouver that circularly integrates the nature, the people and the pact that allows the community to sustain herself.

### The Case
Trasformatorio lab 2023 will be produced with a scheme studied to seed good practices of cooperative culture with a specific aspect on finance and organisation. This scheme is reproducible, simple enough to be implemented in a case study and produce interesting results already in a form that is constructed as a story.

Out of previous experiences we want to implement a system we designed to introduce and map local valueflows, generate value in a transparent way and redistribute wealth. The Lab will be then the first iteration of a complete process.

The action we are planning will be a complete circle of implementation on the ground in the specific case of an artistic production. The lab for will produce this time a spectacle, a village wide show.

For the first iteration is divided in 4 phases: pre production, production, showcase, post production. We would like to implement a local production cycle that uses local values to generate "localcoin" in pre production and production phase and that decides how to use them and distribute them. These coins will be matched by the economy generated by the final event and redistributed. We expect the system to survive the event and be reused.

Details on this design can be given.
- implement experiments for the gift economy
- debt cancellation
- incentives to use coin
- etc

### Expected results
- lasting organisation on site and continued use of the complementary currency in one form or another
- data about value flows in the community used by the community itself
- sustained use of the system for cultural event production
- requests of change in the mvp by the group using it

### Status

We have already created a optimal situation for collaboration in the area with in depth research and on site research (may/june 2022) and securing good participation from local associations and from the town.

The design we have is thought to be complementary of the methodology we use, replicable, and scalable for production of cultural evenements that can then move auitonomously in site specific circuits that we envision in the short future because of the growth of the demand.

The Trasformatorio LAB operations setting up in the local community a cooperative system designed ad-hoc that explicits a value flow that includes and priviledge local resources (voluntary labour, food, hospitality, access).

Our approach is from the perspective of a research organisation and we are looking for founding for the research. The case for research over autonomous organisation that might involve complementary currencies and alternative cooperative systems is delicate, prone to open the way to speculative forces and simply very difficult to found with normal founding.

We wish to present ourselve to explore if our plan defines for your part an opportunity for collaboration.

### What to do
- if we fit into your setup we could talk about a joint development frame for the necessary protocols for construction, operation and success of local coops and grow the guidelines and the technical requirements for scaling them up

## Contacts
Stichting Trasformatorio Amsterdam
Director: Federico Bonelli
@freddbomba
[e-mail]

## further references
### Methodology:
- Federico Bonelli, On Participation https://trasformatorio.net/?page_id=3654
- Sabrina Sauer & Federico Bonelli (2020) Collective improvisation as a means to responsibly govern serendipity in social innovation processes, Journal of Responsible Innovation, 7:sup2, S44-S63, DOI: 10.1080/23299460.2020.1816025

Learn by play/Seminars/Workshops:
- Le Grand Jeu (www.legrandjeu.net)

### Who we are
Trasformatorio is a non profit foundation active in research and social innovation using art methodologies. Our motto is "we grow communities" because we believe that is the right story that grows a good community and art vocation is to help that community to find it, transform it, evolve it. We have a broad transdisciplinary approach and a focus as well on trasformative technologies, social innovation and ecological sustainable approaches, from permaculture to microeconomics. Our expertise goes from being used in the context of EU H2020 projects to set Human Center Design practices and ethics into blockchain related startups (LEDGER first cycle 2018/2019), to the elaboration of a table game to learn together new economical designs by doing (www.legrandjeu.net). As such we have been hired by EUROFUSION project by Max Plank Institute in 2018 to customise the game to their needs of communication.

### What we do and how
In the spring of 2023 The Trasformatorio Stichting (more: do.trasformatorio.net) will be operating its 7th Lab in the region of the val pennavaire, a interesting location between Liguria and Piedmont in the north of Italy. The are consists in a small bioregion of high naturalistic interest, scarsely populated. We have selected the area after a good research following 2021 lab in Liguria and have already invested in the study of the area a on site campaign of 3 weeks in 2022.

The Lab is a temporary operation of artistic and technological research that involves a group of about 30 artists of the most disparate carachteristics (dancers, performer, technologists, designers, makers, musicians and other kind of site specific theater people). They will work in the area, with a research theme and a technical theme for two weeks in an operation co-produced by trasformatorio, all participants, and representants of the territory. 2/3 of the Participants are chosen with an international open call. Other parameters of selections other than artistic are gender balance, inclusiveness, and a number of participants chosen from people active already in the area. The main idea for the artists to be chosen is to present a preliminary idea and to work it out onsite transforming all that is found. Alto 2023 would be the 7th iteration of the lab since 2013.

(more information and documentation www.trasformatorio.net)