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Hi, my name is Stefano.
Let's talk about our festival, "My life is a stand-up comedy",
during which we chose to show unreleased and original videos
in English,
with subtitles,
made by a group of authors,
via the platform comedysubs.org.
What is good about this project
is that it takes place weekly, from June 5th to July 17th.
As it is a satire and comedy festival,
this allows us to deal with controversial topics.
But we like such topics because they are challenging.
Our intention was to "laugh at everyone and everything, without prejudice."
We organised the screenings ourselves,
and we selected and took care of all the contents.
Basically, our main aim was to give people
the chance to have access to this content.
The second aim was to refine the selection.
We basically devoted our attention to the world of outsiders,
a particular subset of the comedic universe.
We selected men as well as women artists,
young as well as older artists.
But all of them are representatives of the theatrical world of satire.
We selected content in American English,
Irish, British English,
and finally Australian English,
so as to cover all facets of multilingualism.
For example, tonight is devoted to a British actor, Ricky Gervais.
He represents the thread uniting all artists in this festival,
that we showed during our weekly screenings.
As a matter of fact, he has a scathing but intelligent style,
which is typical of international stand-up comedy.
Moreover, we undertook to organise a stand-up comedy show here,
with real actors,
with people from our city,
and, in general, with whomever wishes to support this initiative.
They attended the festival, "My life is a stand-up comedy",
so there could be no better people to speak about it.
What I noticed about stand-up comedy, especially the British kind,
is that the artist is often a character of himself,
and does not want to be considered as a real person.
We need to make a distinction here.
I believe that is the starting point to understand this kind of festival.
First of all, what he says is not what he really thinks.
It is just an artifice.
Take care not to confuse it with artificiality, as he is not lying.
He is just exaggerating reality.
We would like to address these topics without filters,
to see how sarcasm, causticity and irony are presented,
so that we can laugh about atrocities,
and at the same time think and talk about them, thus elaborating on them.
This was my ideal of a presentation for our festival,
to put forward to the Forum.
We should not be blindfolded when we do not like certain topics.
They exist and we should take them with a smile.
For us, the Forum for Youth Policies has been a great occasion,
offered by the township to the Leoncavallo and the young,
to finally make ourselves heard
on the design of youth policies in our township.
That is why it has been a great occasion.
We created our association
precisely because the township issued a call for bids
to everyone, including informal groups.
In fact, we applied as an informal group.
But when they recognised us,
we were forced to reveal our identity.
We squatted in this place,
for many years,
as part of a series of attempts
to claim this space for the city.
We squat in this place because we want to be recognised
not merely as "squatters", but as people who are bringing life to it.
We are planning to complete the process, with a view to the Forum,
by organising two festivals:
the first one, devoted to comedy, irony and satire,
therefore aimed towards entertainment;
and a second one, of which Giovanna will be in charge,
devoted to documentaries.
We selected a number of documentaries,
which explore the world of youth.
A world that, obviously,
is inextricably linked to this space.
Actually, this has always been a space
where youth movements could express themselves.
Translation and subtitles by Agnese Morettini www.agnesemorettini.com