Hello!

I am Anna, I am 25 years old and Ihave been living in Venice for a few years although my origins find ground in a small town near Bassano del Grappa. In life I like to set out on the road, traverse landscapes and understand the human and natural forms that determine them.

As I try to look back over my experiences with ASCS, I find various memories and am reminded of the many people I have met. It all started almost ten years ago in the mountains of Veneto and my town, Marostica, where my steps as an educator in the parish crossed those of Jonas, a Scalabrinian father who worked in my educational context. This led me to participate with some friends At a service camp organized in Bassano del Grappa called “More Bridges Less Walls. ” (yes, here for the first time we are starting to talk about this slogan now in our hearts) that addressed about ten teenagers in order to interrogate the meanings that the wall can take on in our everyday context.

Through that camp thus began a period of activism in my city, of questioning and many relationships. So the following year I decided to continue the experience through participation in two weeks of Camp Io Ci Sto in Borgo Mezzanone. This reality marked perhaps most of all my constant willingness to immerse myself in the reality of migration, to not be satisfied with the first “version” of things but to always seek new perspectives, to be uncomfortable.

I met so many people there who are still friends today and with whom I find myself sharing so many small actions of change, to the point that even the following years I decided to go back there and then to attend some of the border places.

So I chose to be contaminated by the experiences from the various migration routes, from Trieste to Oulx, via Cuneo and Ventimiglia.

Over time I then saw how these issues often meet my path and in fact last year, together with Giorgia, another activist and friend, we took the “Crossover” format to Venice where we met with our friends from Along the Balkan Route Diego and Anna. Once again I am reverberating with this great need to be traversed by the stories of the edges, of those pieces of the world that seem to belong to no one but hold so many truths.

I think after all these years of field experiences and attached trainings the best thing is happening right now. In fact, this year I am participating as a volunteer for a few months, in the start-up of the shelter for people on the move in Ceuta, on the Spanish-Moroccan border. For the first time, I put together my master’s thesis topic in Architecture with issues related to border territories. Therefore, I am finding myself studying, analyzing, and dismembering this borderland where people daily try to cross a wall or swim out to sea to get to the European Union.

I am always amazed at how each frontier, each person met and each step taken always vividly embeds itself in my thoughts.

I like to think of ASCS as a mountain trail, a path you travel in search of answers, of something that resolves itself once you get to the top but then ends up making you question the whole journey you’ve made.

In this continual setting out, I occasionally recall a phrase I said at my first camp in Foggia, “what you give stays forever.” and maybe every now and then I take refuge in this idea of stability, of something that remains fixed in the people I meet, deliberately opposing anything that threatens to pass, to pass through me quickly.

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