Here is the list of the ten projects selected by the Jury based on the parameters of relevance to the values promoted by the project, communicative effectiveness of the content, originality and feasibility of the proposal.

Composition of the Jury: Carlo Greppi (Historian and writer), Silvia Guetta (Director of the Postgraduate Course in Didactics of the Shoah, University of Florence), Jitka Janáková (Coordinator of Educational Programs at the Jewish Museum in Prague), Marina Sabatini (Coordinator of Educational Services at MEIS) and Erika Salassa (Archivist, Fondazione 1563).

European Education

We reversed one of Romain Gary’s most meaningful titles: the project aims to promote an inclusive approach, aware of ‘the other’, where adults guide the youngsters by example as well as through words, moving towards a belonging to a shared human citizenry: a ‘house/home’ is the first loss for every refugee precisely because it is the symbol of the value identity we all have.
It is a two-tier path: one for children and one for adults. Both develop over 5 steps by topic: choice, loss, action, choosing again, and exchange. In the installation visitors can use contacts through panels, interactive screens, and sensory installations, through which they can experiment the emotional states and better understand the contents of the exhibition.

The Remembr-house Project was developed with a multidisciplinary approach: civic education, Italian literature, history, and philosophy. We read the documents, seen images, listened to music to gain a better understanding the emotions and the atmosphere of the dark years of the racial laws, and of the horror that followed. This evoked a very strong and painful emotional response in students; they realized how, albeit in different ways, inalienable fundamental human rights are still not respected, as is the case of freedom. House/home as the pace that stores memories and recollections: we felt it was the ideal place to entrust our emotions and thoughts. We imagined the life of a standard family, using objects that would tell the present and the past.
We highlighted the importance they had in everyday life and their value in time, then we asked ourselves the question: which object would we have never given up? Why?

This is our Memorial.
These are our Rooms where we can think.
House/Home is a place we live in.
House/Home is a place inside us.
House/Home is the memory of whom we are and the starting point to go, to seek, to live.

“Feeling at home”: a shared experience of poetic writing and culinary reworking

Students focused on thinking about the house a nd how such thought s echo in each of us with reference to the historical events in a diachronic and synchronic approach that forced children, the elderly, men, and women to abandon their houses.
Discussion on the racial laws, and the deportation of Jews was the starting point, the painful initial focus that then led us to re examine conflicts that involved countries quite close to us. The outcome was expressed in thoughts and verses as well as looking for images and photographs. Why write poems? To communicate irrepressible emotions such as life and passion s that no one can keep within. Students were able to scrutinize, read and investigate their innermost being, observing feelings the mind translates into words and that triggered and arose their interest with the eyes of the heart. They became cantors of the human soul, of all the emotions, of love, memories, nostalgia, joy, pain, and peace. Ours is a vocational training school in Cooking and Hotel Hospitality (Istituto professionale di Enogastronomia e di Ospitalità alberghiera) we asked students to prepare dishes and drinks inspired by immigration or the home/house as the place where you share emotions and loved ones, looking at the future with hope.

A very emotional video was the result of the project: students offered a dramatic narration of how goods and assets were seized from Jews throughout Fascism. Students actively took part in all the phases of the audiovisual preparation and offered a meaningful contribution to the project. The video ends with a passionate refusal of the injustice suffered, leaving open hope for the future.

We decided to present our Project on the House/Home of Memory using a video. The video is in four steps which are our idea of how to bring people closer to the history of the Shoah. In our project we became immersed in these people’s lives and through empathy and rethinking, we tried to evoke the emotions and thoughts that would arise in ‘experiencing’ the same events. Each phase corresponds to an immersive experience, concatenated to the next, with the aim of creating a path that begins as a visit and continues beyond the visit itself, shaping the experience of those who pass through or experience it, leading to a reflection on the issues addressed.

The Project Memory Houses/Homes is a new way to explore the lives of four famous Jews whose goods and properties were seized following the racial laws Mussolini introduced. Artsteps, a platform for virtual exhibitions was used, and students recreated the inside of Sivio Ottolenghi’s and Stella Valabrega’s houses in every detail and very accurately. The Project started with a guided reading of the four selected characters’ biographies, followed by sharing tasks and online research for information and images to illustrate each of the homes. The aim was to offer students a better understanding of the events against the human backdrop of Italy in the twenty years under Fascism.
Students were able to accurately reconstruct the seized spaces and objects using historical sources and official documents: these symbolized the tragedy of the Holocaust and World War 2.The combination of Artsteps, a stimulating and versatile digital tool and of in-depth historical research has produced an innovative and involving exhibition, that tells important stories of resilience and injustice, witnessing tragedies experienced during a complex time in history we have to understand.

INSIDE HOUSE. Leafing through our memories

The Project is based on the idea of producing a medium to medium-large book with recycled or sustainably produced materials such as paper or cards. A book is a self-explanatory object accessible to all, useful when wishing to explore the subject in an independent and interactive manner. The underlying intention is to echo a family book, an object that will identify the house/home as is the repository of a household’s memories. Furthermore, when asked what one would take from a house, many said: a book. The aim of the above-described approach is to create a parallel between past and present, to allow objects to speak so that one may understand that there were actual people behind them, not just the characters of a story in the distant past. We also wish to stress how we all share the same sense of humanity, with similar needs, desires, and ambitions.

The class 3A has created has created an extraordinary three-dimensional model of their prototype memory house. The building, in addition to having a characteristic bookcase- shaped door, also has an original internal structure and the common thread of each floor is memory, an integral part of everyone’s life. The building consists of four floors: basement, ground floor, first floor and, finally, an attic. Starting from the bottom, the basement has been identified as the place of personal memory and past collective memory. On the first floor we find the theme of collective memory in everyday life, being both the most frequented space in everyday life and the one shared with one’s family. It collects within it a series of objects which not only refer to everyday life, but are also a symbol of a peaceful coexistence of very different cultures. Next, the students decided to give a personal touch to the first floor, adding to the furniture a series of objects considered significant and of great value during a class discussion. These things range from a passion for music to the one for sports, creating a perfect fusion between all the personalities of the class. Last, but not least, the attic. It’s located in the superior part of the building and is essentially represented by an office. It carries the theme of targets for the future, on a human and social level, always remembering past experiences and stimulating dialogue and the research for solutions to current issues.

The project of our House /Home of Memory ” follows on from a path on living that started during a workshop on Architecture. Following a careful discussion on personal memory and historical memory , we conceived a project as a n e xhibition stand, that can be visited, to be placed in a city park. The plan of the stand is a six pointed star, each point being a special room of Memory , with objects selected among the working group’s personal memorie s and from the historical documents studied . A maze shaped library stands at the centre of the star with a dome towering above it , symbolizing the heavens above: you have to cross all the
rooms to reach it : the library stands in the middle as it the place of knowledge and because the pr esence among the seized books that are listed in all the inventories of the historical documents.