After the Flood

After the Flood is born from the need to support paths of critical awareness, civic imagination and social inclusion among girls and boys between 11 and 14 years old, offering tools to understand how environmental crises – like the floods that hit Emilia-Romagna in 2023 – intertwine with dynamics of inequality, marginalization and climate injustice. The school represents a central place to recognize and confront the social, emotional and cultural impacts of ecological crises, as well as to counteract phenomena such as exclusion, distrust, disinformation and feelings of powerlessness regarding the future.

Three lower secondary schools located in different contexts of the region – urban, mountainous, and lowland – were selected to test the pilot. Here, the flood is addressed not only as a climate emergency, but as a socio-cultural trauma that altered the relationship between people and their places: maps became useless, boundaries redrawn, familiar spaces rendered unrecognisable, stories interrupted or overwritten. Through participatory artistic practices – visual, performative and narrative – the project invites participants to question the material and emotional transformations of their environment, the forms of narratability of wounded territories and the possibilities of rewriting their own relationship with them.

What is expected to be reached by this pilot action?

PLURALISM
The pilot promotes the plurality of languages, lived experiences and interpretations, recognizing that extreme climate events do not produce a single truth, but a constellation of situated experiences. The three workshops – affective maps, graphic narratives, installations – give value to heterogeneous forms of knowledge: perceptual, emotional, material, symbolic. Pluralism thus becomes an aesthetic and political practice: rebuilding together what was disordered by the water implies recognizing and welcoming divergent, even irreconcilable, points of view.

REFLEXIVITY AND COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION
The methodologies implemented, which support personal reflection and creative expression, will foster participants’ reflexivity and critical thinking on urgent issues such as climate justice and social inclusion, as well as favour students’ active participation and emotional literacy in relation to environmental traumas.

ACTIVE ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS
The pilot activities are connected to the direct experience of the territory and the use of creative languages to support a critical reflection on how young people live and interpret environmental changes. The development of transversal competences and ecological education has a central role, as it is instrumental in promoting awareness of the dynamics of the climate crisis and active participation against all forms of environmental injustice.

Through observations, questionnaires, focus groups and analysis of artistic productions, the research team will identify effective approaches to support processes of symbolic post-crisis construction, strengthen imaginative capacity and promote active participation in community life. The project aims to show how the arts – in their material, narrative and relational forms – can facilitate more inclusive and complex ways of reading environmental and social transformations, offering tools to rebuild not only the places, but also the imaginary and affective fabrics that make them habitable.