Agrabah is an association formed by parents of autistic children and was born in Pistoia in 2002. It is an Experimental project for “Job training for future Farm Community” for adult users.
During the days I spent at Agrabah I collected wild herbs and vegetables grown in the park. The Agrabah operators and young people prepared 15 kg of bread dough to which I added the chopped herbs and vegetables.
We organized work sessions with the operators and the users. In each session I met face to face with one user. Everyone had some bread dough on the table in front of them. Without pre-defining exactly what the result should be or how to deal with the dough, without any rational input, the sessions were held with the expectation that emotional would be transmitted directly to the dough, without any conceptual filter, a language has emerged whose meaning has not yet crystallized.
The project returned to the public with the installation of the emotional (non) forms of the cooked bread, that people have been able to feed on.
The Spontanea project developed at Agrabah was not a drift that dragged us towards a normalizing exercise but rather an opportunity for a dialogue towards being, being able to be and living together.
The collection of wild herbs is a tool for intense listening to the place. Cooking wild herbs and offering them to participants in the experience is a way to transmit the cyclical and unconditional abundance of the Mother Earth. Cyclic and abundance of nature are symbolically placed in contrast to the fear of scarcity, which triggers hoarding and individualism. The circle of the feast is the place to taste the food and discuss knowledge.