Thematic sites - Municipality of Milan

The Futura Memoria project allowed APS Yard to build a shared memory journey together with high school students.

The project is the result of the commitment of Aps Yard, Social Metix ETS, Zero Zero Association, With the collaboration of Upre Rome. The APS Yard association carried out this project thanks to the commitment of a group of "under-21" young people, made up of ten girls and boys. Various Milanese schools were involved with them in the creation of paths of reflection on history, which could stimulate a conversation about the present and the future among the new generations of Milanese. The project wanted to start from the valorization of some key dates of Milanese and global anti-fascist and anti-racist history.

Path on fascism and racism

• 27 January 1945 Remembrance Day, a date that saw the liberation of the survivors of Auschwitz and among them also some people belonging to the deported Milanese families.
• 25 April 1945 The day of the liberation of Milan by the partisan troops under the command of the National Liberation Committee - Upper Italy
• February 19, 1937, the day of the start of the Addis Ababa massacre, the Yekatit 12. From 19 to 21 February, the deaths in Ethiopia at the hands of Italians, according to historians, were around 19.000.

Path on the strategy of tension
12 December 1969 The day of the Piazza Fontana massacre, which was followed by the death of Giuseppe Pinelli and which gave rise to the strategy of tension.

The proposed activities:

• A small permanent thematic library, with a selection of 10 titles chosen with the help of the Zero Zero Association.
• An in-depth historical assembly, with the presence of experts and competent people, but also with the mediation of non-formal and frontal education methodologies.
• The production of Mini-Videos and graphic information that can transmit messages to renew memories.

Institute assemblies #FuturaMemoria
Thematic school assemblies were held in various Milanese high schools, in collaboration with students, the Pinelli family, the historian Aldo Giannuli and Antifascist Memory.

In this phase of the project, the best materials to describe the strategy of tension in their respective schools were selected together with students and several assemblies were organised. Furthermore, on 9 December with the Umberto Boccioni State Art High School and the Caravaggio Art School, "Arte in Piazza" was organised, an afternoon of artistic activities, to give substance to the stimuli and ideas that emerged following the Institute Assemblies and in-depth elections on Piazza Fontana massacre.

On 14 December, in synergy with the Arte a San Siro project, an initiative was promoted in memory of Giuseppe Pinelli, a resident of the neighbourhood, on the occasion of the request for the naming of via Micene as via Pinelli. Through a mural, space was given back to his story, using tools specific to urban cultures, to bring younger people together and also a varied audience who can find interest in exploring the death of Pino Pinelli in visual art.

The inauguration evening of the work saw the participation of Pinelli's daughters, Claudia and Silvia and the authors of the Graphic Novel "Flight without a cry" published by Becco Giallo, selected by the young participants in the project and brought to every school where an assembly was held.

Holocaust Memorial Day
Memory is the strongest tool we have to avoid the mistakes of the past and to enhance the common fabric and shared values ​​of the city, without memory there is no future, without understanding the link between past and present we cannot imagine a better future . With this spirit, APS Yard invited high schools to organize historical in-depth school assemblies, making speakers available to talk about the fight against Nazi-fascism and racial laws on the occasion of Remembrance Day.

Thanks to the involvement of students and teaching staff, several assemblies were organized with the online participation of Moni Ovadia and in the presence of Luca Casarotti, historian and president of the anpi Pavia and activists of Mediterranea Saving Humans, Edith Bruck was instead available to record an interview with questions collected from multiple schools on the meaning of memory.

The people and entities involved to interact with the schools were: Edith Bruck, Moni Ovadia, Mediterranea Saving Humans, Upre Roma already involved in the structuring of the project. A short interview was also conducted with Edith Bruck together with the "under21" girls and boys involved in the project and a short extract was published on our social networks.

EDITH BRUCK
Edith Bruck stage name of Edith Steinschreiber (Tiszabercel, 3 May 1931) is a writer, poet, translator and director, witness to the Hungarian Holocaust, naturalized Italian. Edith Bruck is the youngest of six children of a poor Jewish family. You have known, since childhood, the hostility and discrimination that affect Jews in your country, as in the rest of Europe. In the spring of 1944, at the age of thirteen, she was deported from the Sátoraljaújhely ghetto to Auschwitz and then to other German camps, until April 1945 when she was freed together with her sister. Edith Bruck is part of that second generation of witnesses who in the decade 1959-69 produced important new Holocaust memorials in Italy, before the great proliferation of stories following the nineties. Unlike the first witnesses of the Shoah, Bruck does not limit her narrative to the events in the concentration camp, but recounts her childhood before her deportation and Europe's continued hostility towards the survivors, even after the war.

MONI OVADIA
alomone Ovadia, known as Moni, was born on 16 April 1946 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to a family of Sephardic Jewish ancestry, who moved to Milan. Moni graduated in Political Science at the State University, and in the meantime began a career as a musician and singer, under the guidance of Roberto Leydi, in the Gruppo dell'Almanacco Popolare. Moni Ovadia is a writer, actor, musician and director dedicated to the recovery and reworking of the artistic, literary, religious and musical heritage of Eastern European Jews.

MEDITERRANEAN SAVING HUMANS
Mediterranea is a platform of civil society reality that arrived in the central Mediterranean after the NGOs, criminalized by political rhetoric without any investigation ever leading to a conviction, were largely forced to abandon it. With Mediterranea we talked about the Libyan concentration camps and the conditions of imprisonment and slavery to which the people who migrate there from sub-Saharan Africa are forced.

YEKATIT 12
Through reflections on Italian fascism and racism, APS Yard noticed that students had many questions about Italian colonialism, which was poorly explored in Italian school curricula. For this reason he created infographics and minivideos, disseminated through social media and sent to students, on the Addis Ababa massacre.
A day to remember the horrors and victims of Italian colonialism, an in-depth study so as not to forget the massacre in Addis Ababa.
#Yekatit12 or February 12th (according to the Ethiopian calendar which is equivalent to February 19th in the Gregorian calendar), the date on which the Addis Ababa massacre occurred: in 1937 between February 19th and 21st the city was the scene of several episodes of brutal violence and retaliation against Ethiopian civilians, carried out by Italian civilians, soldiers and fascist squads. On February 19, 1937, two young men of the Ethiopian resistance, Abraham Deboch and Mogus Asghedom, during a celebration, attempted to kill the highest authority in the city: the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani: Graziani, and before him Badoglio, had distinguished himself for having ordered executions summary, aimed at subduing the civilian population, given the difficulty encountered by the Italian army in the war against the Ethiopian army. The war had to end at all costs, so Badoglio decided to use lethal gas, breaking the military laws of the time, and Graziani then attacked the population. Starting from February 19th, immediately after the attack, the Italians took up truncheons, beat and killed everyone they found on the street. In the afternoon, then, the repression becomes scientific: the Italians move in groups, chase civilians, burn houses, wait for people to escape and finish off those who flee with hand grenades. By order of Mussolini "all suspected civilians and religious must be executed, and without delay". From 19 to 21 February 1937 the deaths in Ethiopia at Italian hands, according to historians, were around 19.000. In 1955, in memory of all the victims of the fascist repressions that occurred during the colonial era, a monument was erected which bears the name of the date itself, after which Yekatit 12 square is also named. The monument was created by Ethiopian and Yugoslavian sculptors, on the occasion of Marshal Tito's official visit to Ethiopia.

25 April
For April 25th APS Yard wanted to create a series of workshops and in-depth moments with the under21 group on Italian colonialism, to understand how to deal with the topic with their peers. A series of infographics were created on Yekatit 12, the fascist massacre in Addis Ababa and it was decided to bring the stories of forgotten partisans who tell how anti-fascism and anti-racism must be built together, bringing out the stories of resistance to fascism and colonialism. A series of meetings called "Partisan Struggle, Decolonial Struggle, stories of overseas partisans" were proposed with Diana Pavlovic, who provided tools to remember Tzigari and the Roma partisans, Luca Casarotti, historian and president of Anpi Pavia who spoke the “overseas partisans” research project and the experience of the Mario band.

The author Pap Khouma was asked to tell about the Senegalese troops who participated in the liberation from Nazi fascism in Europe and who were prevented from parading in liberated Paris because they were black. Angelica Pesarini, researcher and expert in gender and racism studies, shared materials and stories about Giorgio Marincola, an Italian-Somali partisan.
On April 25, 2021, a plaque was placed in memory of Giorgio Marincola and Giuseppe Tzigari, together with some ANPI sections, the family of Marincola and Angelica Pesarini, the Kethane movement, Upre Roma and Giuseppe Tzigari's son.

Finally, on 25 March 2022, APS Yard together with the associations Upre Roma and Razzismo Brutta Storia exposed the themes Porrajmos, Italian colonialism and racism at the Manzoni high school, on the occasion of a three-day event organized to talk about Antifascism.