Tools For After is a cultural project that won the first Capitali della Creatività [Capitals of Creativity] competition, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aimed at both the Italian Cultural Institutes and the Italian diplomatic-consular network, worldwide. The project, created by Angelo Gioè, the current director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut, and curated in its entirety by architect Maurizio Corrado, was presented by the Italian Cultural Institute in Melbourne, the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut (Design), and the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia (Design), and will soon be presented by the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade. The initiative showcases the Italian approach to tackling the challenges of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is a method of reading reality. Everything is changing: the economy, how to think and make culture, the very view of the world and the human being’s place in the cosmos. The issues, fears, needs, concepts, rules, scenarios and discourse on which our culture is based have suddenly become obsolete and unusable. The point of no return is behind us; we have entered the aftermath.
What can we do? What are the tools for the after? What scenarios await us? What issues need to be addressed? We need to imagine.

TFA is a workshop of ideas, solutions, projects, imaginings, models and tools to draw a collective map of the imaginary of the Anthropocene, a collaborative exploration of possibilities, solutions and ways to deal with everyday practice. It is a call to a utopia, to develop the imaginary, to propose ideas, and to build a survival manual for the world’s coming transformations, an atlas of solutions, a range of strategies.

After Tools for After Design at Sursock Palace this last spring, the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut, in collaboration with Metropolis Art Cinema Association, presents Tools For After Cinema, a selection of the most interesting proposals of new Italian cinematography, presented to Lebanese audience. The six days of cinema work around themes related to the Anthropocene. The selection was curated by Maurizio and Antar Corrado, along with Elisa Roncalli.

Art Session 3 

LIKE THE GRAVE OF A STONE, LIKE THE CRADLE OF A STAR, by Giorgiomaria Cornelio, Lucamatteo Rossi, 27 min

Let’s say we are still at the beginning. Let a magician trace a fairy tale that can be read as a geography of similarities and migrations, a memorial of the journey where the Ogham (the ancient Irish alphabet, the origin of cinema, the double gesture of carving lines on stone and film) meets and mixes with atlases, embroidered maps, tarot cards that we have scattered in the places where we have lived. A film of correspondences, not only as proximities, but also as approaches, encounters, coincidences, proposals of etymology: if the sky is an immense poem, Braille, pierced in the night of the film, is its celestial alphabet. Correspondences and revolutions in the fluid play of “hydrologies” that manifest, reinvent the world, and so on, from the iris to the flower, in the journey that never ends, never wears out: “Voyage that never ends.”

Year of production 2017

RAM, by Gaetano Fracassio, 1hr

In the suburbs of an Italian city, everyday life takes on surreal tones, and a series of unlikely but real characters alternate between urban panoramas and suspended lives that are a mixt of irony, dreams and necessity, leading the protagonist to say the only sentence in the entire film: “Welcome to the merry-go-round of love. If I didn’t believe in love, I’d breed fish”.

Production year 2021