Bologna, 21 May 2024 – Michele Rech is also there, aka Zerocalcare among the activists of the Don Bosco park against the demolition of the Besta schools in Bologna. “Beyond the defense of greenery and trees, the idea that things are maintained, restored, refurbished, rather than tearing everything down and rebuilding new things, and then replanting them later, is a dynamic that seems correct to me”.
“The fight against the demolition of the Besta schools – he continues – inside the Don Bosco park responds to the type of society I would like and in the direction I would like to go, rather than, in fact, projects that then sweep everything away from above”.
Zerocalcare in the park of the Besta school at risk of demolition (Photo Dire)
That’s why this morning Zero limestone he met the activists inside the park, who told him all the stages of the story that led to the permanent garrison and how the battle is continuing with the municipal administration, to which the committee has in fact proposed a renovation of the building already existing rather than its reconstruction from scratch. And also of the dispute with the ‘other’ committee, which was instead in favor of the project.
“They invited me just to tell me about it this dispute here, which seems to me to capture a lot of points that are important in general for our cities, to see what model of city and society we have in mind in general – explains the cartoonist – the fact that there are in any case communities that they say they want a say and that ‘this is the neighborhood we live in, we want to manage it one way or another’, I think it deserves a reward somehow”.
All in one city, Bologna, where “many self-management experiences and participation have been paved in recent years and they transformed Bologna into a city from what was a cultural hotbed that was watched by all of Italy, where people also came to draw inspiration from something much drier and much more similar to a standard model that is now everywhere”. Rech also signed the petition against the demolition of Besta schools, promising activists that he would return. “I make comics, I have no influence on anything or anyone – he added – but if there is also a way to do something here to continue talking about it, I’m happy”.
Michele Rech, for everyone Zerocalcare also intervened on the protests of the university collectives who today intervened during the Academic Senate of the University of Bologna to ask for a stop to research projects related to Israel or to companies that develop war technologies, following a months of mobilization complete with an ‘acampada’ of tents in Piazza Scaravilli.
The fact that the student population questions the agreements with Israeli universities “it seems like the most normal thing in the world to me”, and that in other situations “such as the one in support of the Kurdish people” the request to interrupt commercial, sporting, cultural relations and partnerships with the Turkish state “has never received that type of welcome, as is happening now with a country that is objectively committing war crimes”.
Towards their battle “there is my support to the extent that a form of obscurantism is described from many quarters, but in reality that is what is asked, more or less always”.
