In the heart of the historic center of Salerno, the collective of architects BLAM has transformed an abandoned sixteenth-century church into a vibrant center of cultural production: iMorticelli. This urban regeneration project, started in 2018, reimagined the ecclesiastical space to create a community hub that hosts cultural events, a social café, and creative workshops. Winner of the public call for proposals Creative Living Lab, iMorticelli is a successful example of historical heritage recovery through active citizen involvement.
The sixteenth-century church of San Sebastiano del Monte dei Morti, also known as the Church of the Morticelli, has been brought back to life after decades of abandonment. This sacred place, left unused since the 1980s, is now the city's first socially-oriented cultural production center. Led by the urban regeneration collective BLAM, the project has turned the ecclesiastical space into a vibrant creative and community hub.
Since 2018, the iMorticelli project has adopted co-production approaches typical of living labs, involving professionals, administrations, and above all active citizens. This collaborative effort has seen the project win the Creative Living Lab public notice. With the support of the Municipality of Salerno, the Salernitana Community Foundation ETS, Ablativo, Arteria Salerno, and BAG studio, iMorticelli is consolidating its Community Point dimension, stimulating interaction and creativity among residents and visitors.
In recent years, iMorticelli has activated a cultural hub, a production center with a hybrid and site-specific cultural offering, a neighborhood concierge and info point, and a social café that promotes local and organic products. The reopening of the church marked the beginning of an adaptive reuse journey of the historic asset, transforming the former church into a creative living laboratory. This space has become an incubator for new entrepreneurial and cultural ideas.
Recently, workshops open to the public have been organized to co-program future activities, including a tactical urban planning and self-construction workshop, which redefined the relationship between iMorticelli and Largo Plebiscito, the square in front. These workshops involved students, young professionals, and the local community, promoting greater interaction and cooperation. Through a practical-theoretical approach based on learning-by-doing, iMorticelli aims to continue to be a catalyst for new energies and resources for the territory, exploring new forms of use and sustainable management of public space.
I had a conversation with Ludovica La Rocca, one of the architects of the collective, and asked her some questions to better understand the project of the former church Imorticelli and their design and operational work.
#1 answer
Hello, how was the BLAM collective born and what are the themes at the center of your projects?
Hello! Blam was essentially born out of a need. As newly graduated architects and active citizens, we found ourselves with the desire to feel useful and give a purpose to our work. It was not enough to deal with empty containers without paying due attention to the content: the people who inhabit and make these places. So, in a sea of uncertainties and a wave of enthusiasm, in 2018 we adopted this onomatopoeic sound, Blam, with which we wanted to reproduce the sound of a door opening, the crash of something breaking and asserting itself; a sort of ring that could reflect a change in our professional lives, but also the disruptive effect we wanted to generate in the territories where we would work.
Our projects essentially define cultural-based urban regeneration strategies in which we are very interested in the reuse of public spaces, especially heritage sites, and the relationship between these spaces and the resident communities. In these processes, we deal with capacity building paths, community empowerment, as well as new entrepreneurship in the cultural world.
#2 answer
How do you integrate your design activity with the specific theme involving urban regeneration processes and recovery of spaces?
As I mentioned, our activity largely involves designing urban regeneration processes on different scales. Almost all design activities involve portions or different aspects of broader strategies, from designing cultural programs to building participatory processes for defining urban or territorial plans. The research question that drives us is always the relationship that exists between inhabitants and places: in terms of awareness, tools, representation, active involvement in decision-making processes functional to their transformation. All actions become instrumental in opening new avenues for reflection and action, to improve the quality of the urban contexts we inhabit and the quality of our lives.
#3 answer
How do you define your project action and how does it guide your initiatives?
Blam operates in the middle ground between institutions and communities, contributing to the design of new spaces of cooperation between citizens and public administration, and new models of co-governance. For this reason, we stimulate the emergence of desires and aspirations of residents, facilitate their participation in decision-making processes, and encourage the use of new governance tools so that bottom-up experiences and practices can become the norm and institutional structure. All our initiatives, in different ways, try to trigger this mutual exchange, activating pieces of stronger, more aware, and more influential communities in urban transformations.
#4 answer
One of your most important and well-known projects is the iMorticelli Community Point, what is the idea that led the collective to choose to work mainly on abandoned areas of Salerno?
As we often say, we wanted to try to build not buildings, but opportunities around which people can reappropriate them. We were particularly interested in public spaces, places of cultural heritage, the way of living in the city, and the empowerment of citizens. At the time, some of us were involved in a university thesis that intersected evaluation, architectural design, and restoration with the desire to activate a concrete process of temporary reuse of a public space. We were approaching 2018, the European Year of Cultural Heritage, and there was a growing interest in heritage in disuse as resources and opportunities, rather than waste. In the specific case, in Salerno, we focused a lot on mapping disused spaces of ecclesiastical nature, perhaps the most substantial infrastructure present in the national territory that raises a very strong question about its reuse, the opportunities it presents, and the necessary approaches to define new functions, respecting the symbolic values they present. In agreement with the municipality of Salerno and the Department of Architecture, attention focused precisely on the former church of San Sebastiano del Monte dei Morti, known as the Morticelli, unused since the 1980s. And from there, a story began to be written, growing over time and now more alive than ever with the city's first Community Point.
#5 answer
How have you involved citizens in the project and how is their active participation managed?
The engagement methods are very diverse: from community workshops to redefine together the perspectives of the space and reformulate its offer, to forms through which to submit proposals to work in thematic workshops, to calls published to involve residents and/or professionals in specific projects. The main objective is for iMorticelli to be a co-production gym, where communities are involved in creative processes from a cultural welfare perspective, with the intention of offering a unique proposal, specific to the space and its context. Then, everyone can enjoy it as they wish, or not. The important thing is that they have the opportunity to do so.
#6 answer
What are the major challenges and greatest satisfactions in working closely with the local community?
A small premise: let's always try to talk about communities in the plural form, aware of interacting with resident or temporary communities, communities of proximity or communities of intent, which by nature and different objectives can recognize themselves in the space and find opportunities to express themselves not only for themselves or for others, but with others.
Among the main challenges, certainly managing a plurality of languages that are consistent and appropriate for different interlocutors; always preserving maximum attention to listening, at every level of interaction; stimulating people's aspirational capacity, without risking generating illusions at the same time. Among the greatest satisfactions, certainly being recognized by our names by Mrs. Anna; seeing projects walking on their own, with volunteers and new professionals taking care of them personally; having seen new relationships born, whether of friendship, love, or professional, among people who did not know each other before and now organize themselves independently of us or the space.
#7 answer
What are the most significant effects you have observed in terms of building relationships and social cohesion through your projects?
The impact assessment of iMorticelli 2024, for example, provides some indications on this, reinforcing what I mentioned earlier. Many individuals believe that participating in the activities, and thus in the enhancement of this space, has greatly impacted the quality of their lives, allowing them to build new social networks with new friendships, new people to rely on, feeling for the first time part of a community of purpose, and not of use. A piece of community to share the desire to be together, to participate in a common goal, to talk, listen, dance, discover new languages, engage in learning new skills, listen to new music. "I think that even the relationships I have developed here have helped me improve myself [...] social experiences help you in reevaluating yourself, to say 'so I serve a purpose'". This response obtained from one of the impact evaluation interviews perfectly explains the relationship we constantly seek to build between people and places so that this civic engagement can improve one's quality of life.
#8 answer
What are the main activities and programs currently offered at the iMorticelli cultural center?
Every year iMorticelli undergoes a bit of a transformation: communities come together to plan the new challenges to face in the upcoming months. This year, at the 2024 General States in June, 7 new social challenges emerged that cultural operators are called to address through cultural initiatives, from theatrical performances to music, from cinema to design. The hybridization of these arts is leading to the definition, in these days, of a new program that increasingly adopts cultural welfare approaches. We can certainly say that many of the activities and formats will be confirmed: chess meetings, Spanish language workshops, International meetings, candlelight concerts, independent magazine presentations, and knitting workshops. Many new formats are about to be born, and for these, we just have to wait a few more weeks!
#9 answer
What are your future goals for this space?
We are working with the administration to activate tools that can assign this asset with a longer time horizon, so that it can develop stronger partnerships and plan its future with greater breadth, in terms of economic and human sustainability. Furthermore, the experience of this Community Hub has developed a replicable model that will soon be replicated in other spaces in the city, thus activating a network of Community Hubs on an urban scale.
#10 answer
We are almost at the end of this interview, but not before sharing some music. Let's imagine being in iMORTICELLI on a summer evening with music playing in the background, what are we listening to? Thank you
People Have the Power, by Patti Smith!
