Wonder Grottole in the project “Re-animate: Designs for Life-enhancing economies in Anthropological Perspective”
Christina Jerne, from the University of Copenhagen and the Community Economies Institute, is currently studying Wonder Grottole, and its activities in territorial regeneration and cultural investment. Wonder Grottole will be one of the case studies in a project entitled ‘Re-animate: Designs for Life-enhancing economies in Anthropological Perspective‘ funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Christina stayed in our Wonder Casa and became a temporary resident of Grottole, experiencing some of our experiences with the local community. With Michela she discovered local legends and stories, with Nisio the tradition of terracotta and pottery making, and with Silvio the cave cellars and local wine culture.
The Re-animate project
New visionary projects for more life-friendly economies – such as the circular economy, regenerative leadership, degrowth and commoning – have recently emerged as powerful reactions to dominant capitalist practices. RE-ANIMATE explores how such projects are being translated into practice, focusing on both the challenges and the potential of doing economics differently.
Stimulated by critical world conditions, new visionary projects for life-enhancing economies have taken off in recent years. Aiming to design pro-life, sustainable, regenerative and relational economic activities, these projects seek to reform or replace established capitalist practices that have proven to deny human and non-human life through unsustainable, degenerative and growth-oriented logics. By emphasising the potential vitality of all the world’s components, the living ecosystem and the interconnectedness of human and non-human beings, the projects aim to revive, or reanimate, economic thought and action.
The aim of RE-ANIMATE is to trace and analyse how particular projects of life-enhancing economies are enacted, challenged, reworked or obfuscated in an effort to rethink and reform dominant capitalist conceptions and activities. By linking field studies and anthropological theories, the ambition is thus to create new insights into the convergences and divergences between established, life-negating logics of growth and different projects of new, life-enhancing economies and ways of being.
(photo by Francesco Freddo)