Carmen Concilio
Università di Torino
Carmen Concilio is Full Professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Torino, Italy. She is recipient of the Canada-Italy Innovation Prize 2021, she is member of AISC and President of AISCLI. She published Imagining Ageing. Representations of Age and Ageing in Anglophone Literatures (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018). In the field of Canadian Studies, she published works on artists Emily Carr, Marlene Creates and E. Burtinsky, on novelists C. Edwards, A. Michaels, A. Munro, H. O’Hagan, M. Ondaatje, N. Ricci, M. Thien, A. York, and poets R. Bringhurst and M. Dumont. She co-edited with R. Lane, Image Technologies in Canadian Literature. Narrative, Film and Photography (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009). She was recipient of the Canadian Government’s Faculty Enrichment Program 2000 and 2009. She translated Nino Ricci: Roots and Frontiers / Radici e frontiere (Turin: Trauben, 2003). Her main fields of research and expertise are Literature and the Arts, Urban studies, and the Environmental Humanities.
Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future (after Covid-19)
4 Dicembre 2021
SPAZIO MET-BO
In this paper I would like to discuss, analyze, and assess the results of the experimental project conducted under the auspices of Canada-Italy Innovation Award 2021. The project involved two target groups of senior people (over 60), one based in Turin and one based in Montreal. The Turin group called “Third Time” has been active since 2016, and coalesced around the objective of healthy and active ageing, with year-round activities and laboratories which have three main purposes: socialization and psychological well-being, physical training, and cognitive engagement. The Montreal group, of about 30 members, was recruited in the Spring 2021, with the purpose to create a twinship and a joint workshop, on-line, thanks to Zoom meetings. The two groups responded enthusiastically to the first joint on-line meeting and agreed on working together on two different areas: 1) producing flash fiction, or flash poetry in relation to their own experience of Covid-19; 2) producing “memory maps” of a place they are particularly fond of. The workshop in creative writing was mainly focused on giving voice to seniors, not only to empower them as storytellers of their own Covid experience, but also as advisers for future generations on how to mitigate and endure difficult times. The second workshop was meant to map out people’s mobility, for both Torino and Montreal are cities with a high rate of immigrants. In this context, I would like to draw conclusions on the results achieved, within the framework of Narrative Medicine Studies and Pshychogeography Studies.
