FOCUS: ADRIANO OLIVETTI
VI edition – Matera, October 10, 11 and 12 2019
What is Focus Adriano Olivetti?
The Focus: Adriano Olivetti takes place over two days, generally a Friday and a Saturday, during which scholars and entrepreneurs put their experiences together in the wake of the Olivettian precedent. It is residential, meaning that people are invited to stay not only for the time strictly necessary for their speech, but for the duration of the entire meeting, into the belief that complex issues require time, listening and sometimes silence, and that in the best Mediterranean tradition, a sober banquet is often the best time to bring creative syntheses, otherwise unattainable into reach, result of appropriately warmed sympathies. Because of this, as it has been happening for a long time, many seeds have emerged alongside the panels of the Focus: ideas, network building, partnerships, projects, relationships, lighting, a sowing that sprouts and travels with its own legs well beyond our passage, creating a community of companions that reflect together and share experiences even after the days spent together. The Focus: Adriano Olivetti is proposed as a place to elaborate new possible practices and closer collaborations, to make everyone mutually more solid, both cognitively, economically and financially, in view of a new community that aims at a social transformation. The Focus: Adriano Olivetti intends to persevere in the exploration of “positive experiences” of a “convivial” economy, to grasp their “technical” secret, after the “epistemic” one, in the Olivetian viaticum, to go to the root of the discomfort of the times and distil the antidote, dissatisfied that more often we are content to just sedate the symptoms.
Why Adriano Olivetti?
In the articulated offer of attentions to the experience of Adriano Olivetti, rising in our country for some time, the Focus: Adriano Olivetti is proposed as the appointment of elaboration of his thought. Not because the topic can be exhausted by this or that particular event, but for the specific proposed cut: special companies are called to focus on the fundamental Olivetti issue, eminently political, conducted through a conscious entrepreneurial action. The hope is that companies will return (or sometimes begin) to finally produce culture in the age of complexity, assuming in full the responsibilities, inscribed in their very existence, towards the ecological-social systems that they inhabit. There is no other possible choice in the face of the ecological emergency other than the one between “assumption of responsibility” and “predation / destruction”. It is in this framework that the Agenda 2030 of the UN has been found; its 17 strategic goals to save the Planet must be understood, mind you, in a coordinated and synchronic way, under penalty of an elegant and commendable ineffectiveness. They are the following (but there may be others, the reflection remains open …): 1. Defeating poverty; 2. Defeating hunger; 3. Guaranteeing health and well-being; 4. Offer quality education; 5. Promote gender equality; 6. Guarantee clean water and sanitation; 7. Get clean and accessible energy; 8. Offer decent work and economic growth; 9. Promote sustainable businesses, innovation and infrastructure; 10. Reduce inequalities; 11. Building sustainable cities and communities; 12. Educate to responsible consumption and production; 13. Fight against climate change; 14. Protecting underwater life; 15. Protect life on earth; 16. Building peace, justice and solid institutions; 17. Join in partnership for concrete goals. What does it mean to work concretely in this direction? in an engineering way coordinated among all the stakeholders of a community? which means “not” in a partial or moralistic way? Thanks to the Adriano Olivetti experience, once we wear the right lenses, we rediscover ourselves with unexpected navigation maps that will make our journey easier.
The meetings are recorded videos and are made available on https://focusadrianoolivetti.it/video-library/
where all the interventions of the previous editions can also be found.