In September 2019, RUFA Pastificio Cerere location, in the heart of the San Lorenzo district, hosted the “NeoRural Futures” experience, the summer school of the SpeculativeEdu research project.
It was, specifically, a study plan funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus+ program, to investigate emerging practices and approaches of design fiction, near future, speculative and critical design and to create a textbook and an online toolkit, making the research accessible and consultable to lecturers, professionals and students.
On that occasion, when terms such as “social distancing” or “pandemic” were found only in books and not in reality, RUFA ideally embraced students and faculty from Europe, the United States, China, Palestine, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, India, Israel and South Africa. The forty selected participants who attended the different work sessions, led by an interdisciplinary team of ten members, including tutors and coordinators, have then investigated the transformations of rurality in relation to global phenomena to create future scenarios, using and testing the methods and approaches that emerged from the research, also creating an exhibition.
About a year after that performing experience, the monograph of “Neorural Futures” curated by HER: She Loves Data has been published. The monograph is in English and documents the whole summer school: from concept to output, from methodology to process, it is a case study designed to be used by students, lecturers, professionals, institutions and cultural operators. In this moment speculative design is a very actual methodology: the world, all of a sudden, has completely changed and has to be faced as such. For RUFA an experience to be repeated and enhanced.
