Leopold Banchini

One thousand years ago, the Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis had to flee his island on a raft to reach the safe haven of Sfax on the north African shore; he wrote:

For I have been banished from Paradise,

And I long to tell you its story.

Were it not for the saltiness of tears,

I would imagine my tears as rivers.

Starting inside the Ear of Dionysius, listening to the voices of the past, we will stroll down the hill and built our own raft. But this time not to flee. The raft will be the island of our temporary community, where we will test the joy and the boundaries of sharing a confined space. Our pirate vessel will be a stateless platform made of the collection of our autonomous desires. Rather than planning, we will be building, pushed by the urgency to accommodate our primary needs. We will live, eat, rest and dance together, and hopefully shake our preconceived ideas about inclusivity. We will design for our real world, a floating one.