In 2017, Careof turns 30 and wants to use this occasion as a pretext to reflect on his own story, to involve artists, curators and cultural managers mainly active in the city of Milan (nonprofit spaces, festivals, theatre organizations, artist run spaces, independent publishers) and, at the same time, to think about the future of each of us, people who are present in the local and extra local cultural context.
Starting from the questions "who are we, what are we for and how we want to continue" and with the aim of re-focusing the discourse on doing well and better rather than surviving or surrendering, we invited three international guests Andrea Phillips, Christophe Meierhans, Alex Martinis Roe (Formations) to hold a five-day workshop to help us collectively develop different themes and reflections that pertain to the practices of all involved.
From September 18 to September 24 2017 Careof offers itself as a physical space and educational occasion for the invited organizations in order to discuss about the following macro-areas: understanding the impact of culture production in a local context and its "deferred value"; what alternative economies can we imagine to support artistic practices and how to adopt artistic methodologies in the cultural organization management. A technical exercise and a science-fiction setting that will help us bring back a meaningful vocabulary for our work and the role it plays in the social context.
Prossimità di spazi e tempi aims to introduce new methods and new lexicons to redefine the role of actors in the social and cultural context. The project, also in its visionary nature, is born with the specific purpose of rediscovering the space of the relationship, taking care of our time and our work, in an apparently pacified but terribly compulsive reality with which we are often forced to interact.
How can a cultural organization build communities?
How can you work in order to talk to the public and make experience of it?
Can you measure the value of an organization not only through numbers but through its social impact?
How does your domestic policy, and the methods of distribution and remuneration of work, are confronted with the current crisis?
These are some of the questions.
The workshop will be anticipated by a series of in-depth studies published online, thanks to the collaboration with KABUL magazine .

During the weekend of September 22 - 24, Careof becomes a place for self-reflection, with artistic interventions conceived as small events that appear in parallel to the considerations presented during the days of the workshop. In the increasingly urgent context of the global economy, in a rapidly evolving workforce landscape, artist Danilo Correale presents Reverie: On the Liberation from Work, a sound work born in New York in collaboration with a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, consisting of two guided hypnosis recordings aimed at relaxing the body and mind in preparation for a post-work society. Careof here acts as a listening hall where audiences can experience hypnosis through headphones. In the same space, you will be able to experience Fake Therapy, a practice launched by Valentina Desideri in 2010, whose goal is to use preprinted cards to "heal" the other.
And if the "care" has worked out properly, the utopias illustrated by Jordi Colomer's X-Ville movie will also become real if viewed with the right gaze. The film was produced with the collaboration of a group of students and the participation of the inhabitants of the city of Annecy in France.