In 2017, the Fondazione Merz accepted the proposal of the MIBACT’s Divisione Generale Arte e Architettura Periferie (DGAAP) to the Comitato delle Fondazioni Italiane di Arte Contemporanea to realise projects linked to the themes of cultural redevelopment, city margins, participation and relations between young people and art Contemporary.

The Fondazione’s Educational Department, in collaboration with a.titolo and artist Ludovica Carbotta, who has been engaged for years in a study of the theme of the city, between reality, utopia and imagination, has launched the project entitled Chiribiri. Fare città tra museo e giardino (‘‘Chiribiri’. Making cities between museum and garden’) to intensify the dialogue with the San Paolo district and its inhabitants and to promote the enhancement of the public garden in Piazzale Chiribiri.

The project involved a group of students from a local school, the  Liceo artistico “Renato Cottini”, in a process that combined study and research with creative experience, with a view to learning by doing. The first, preparatory, phase alternated theoretical lessons with a series of exercises to experiment with new ways of observing, narrating and imagining urban space. After meeting in the spaces of Piccolo Cinema, an association active in the Barriera di Milano district, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, directors who have worked with different ways of narrating and documenting places and their inhabitants, the workshop with Ludovica Carbotta began.

The workshop included the exploration and analysis of the garden’s space and the collective conception and realisation of objects, signs and actions that temporarily occupied the area of ​​piazza Chiribiri, like traces of another reality, Iribirich, with its own rules, pleasures and habits.