Mizar, the project that changes the grammar of the meeting
In Sardinia a community of adolescents is born that recognizes itself in the sky
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There is no performance to evaluate, nor a before and after with photos to compare. Mizar, however, has left something that is still moving: like a trajectory, like a voice-over that continues to say: "it can be done differently".
It was 2021 when, in Sardinia, this experiment began : thirteen teenagers, between 12 and 18 years old, some blind, others sighted, began to walk together without hierarchies. Not to learn something "about disability", but to challenge the very division between those who "help" and those who "are helped". A group that held hands - literally and symbolically - to explore the world together, but with the shared desire to learn from each other and build new meanings.
The project, curated by the association Punti di Vista Ets and supported by funds from the Otto per Mille of the Waldensian Church, crossed the Island and then went further . Up to Bologna. Up to that part of us that we usually don't listen to.
“I learned to look with other senses,” said Margherita. But it’s not just a metaphor. In MIZAR, we learned to use echolocation – yes, just like bats – to orient ourselves among the trees. We explored the Anteros museum with our hands. We recorded the voice of emotions, bodies, the earth. And Radio Elfi wasn’t a game: it was a new form of memory.
The Boscoteca Itinerante brought stories among the trunks, while in the silence of the Giardino Margherita in Bologna new sentences were constructed, made of touch, of stumbles, of a language that does not take sight for granted.
“The project has certainly taught me to question my point of view, and not to be ashamed if I change it,” added Giovi.
The boys, “elves and elves”, as they chose to call themselves, have unlearned their roles. They have tried to do what is rarely asked of teenagers: build a community without recipes. «We have not returned to the same. We are no longer spectators of the world, we have become part of the landscape», highlighted Martina Balloi, educator, «This project is a choral work that involves educators, families, social professionals and the boys themselves, the true protagonists of change. Everyone actively participates in a process that has as its objective the improvement of the quality of life, understood not only as individual well-being, but as a collective condition».
Mizar has thus left room for the unsaid, the incomplete, the ambiguous. He has allowed families to trust enough to let their children go without cell phones, without supervision. And he has given them back adolescents who recognize themselves as capable of orienting themselves, of listening, of welcoming.
It is a project that does not end, because its shape is that of the constellations: scattered, but connected. And if the name of the project comes from a double star, the meaning is found here: duplicity is not separation, but tension, movement, possibility. As one of the participants said: "This project is a journey towards infinity. It cannot end."
