Puzzle Project — Acting From an Emerging Future
By: Presencing Institute
Tags: Integration, Stories From The Field, Refugees, Immigration

by Susan George, Uri Noy Meir and Ilaria Olimpico

curated by Rachel Hentsch

Puzzle is a capacity building project in the asylum and refugee system in the Umbria region of central Italy. It began in January 2017 when there was an enormous influx of immigrants and ended in March 2019 when there was merely a trickle of new entries due to a right wing supremacist policy determined by the Home Office elected in June 2018. The intention of the project designed in 2016 was to compose the immigration ‘Puzzle’ by bringing the institutions, asylum seekers, local associations and citizens and the managers of the “welcoming” system together in order to search for innovative replicable solutions. The project was divided into five different actions; we shall concentrate here on action two (inter-institutional relations) and action five (grass roots integration) where Theory U was used.

The visionary coordinator of the Project, Gabriella Delfino, presented the project as a case study at the first Italian U Theory Festival, “Cominciamo!” which took place in Milan June 2018. We facilitators and Social Presencing Theater practitioners (Susan George, Uri Noy Meir and Ilaria Olimpico) have worked with Gabriella and other excellent professionals on the project, as we saw it as an opportunity to bring together stakeholders from across the divides of a complex system, to sit around the “same table”, around a “shared fire”. We have been inspired by the invitation of Social Presencing Theatre (SPT) to trust the basic goodness of people, the desire of a system to be healthy, and the wisdom that can arise from the individual and the social body when present to itself.

Dialogue among public institutions

Action two started with Gabriella, Susan and Uri interviewing the main social actors (the prefect, the Questura immigration head, middle management in the Prefettura (the arm of the Home Office in the area), local mayors, the staff of the CAS (Centro di Accoglienza Straordinario — centers of emergency “welcome”), the Regional government education manager, and the health department dealing with immigrants. These people worked in different impenetrable silos, and had only formal contacts with the other silos.

The interviews helped us to feel the system. We saw that the staff in the different institutions were overworked and suffering from burnout, and that

they did not see themselves as part of a system or as part of the problems within the system. They sensed that some things were not working but didn’t know how to fix them.

The first step was to enable them to informally recognise that there was a system, and that it was broken. This happened at the edges of a formal meeting in a spontaneous circle and was very moving. They sensed the paradox of asylum seekers who had braved the Mediterranean Sea being suspended in an institutional limbo for over two years and being reduced to living off institutional charity. Their role, they thought, was to welcome and look after people in need, rather than set up the conditions for their independent progress.

Learning journeys to the margins

Action five began with a learning journey by Ilaria and Uri (with Gabriella and Susan joining parts of it) — to find out how the beneficiaries living in the CAS, who sometimes waited two years before knowing if their request to stay in Italy had been accepted or not, lived through this experience. This came as the result of a request from the prefecture of Perugia to visit two CAS facilities, CAS Montebello and CAS Colle Umberto, where specific tensions existed.

The impression was that although the two CAS were well equipped and aesthetically pleasing, there was a sense of isolation and disconnection from the surroundings and the local community. The staff in both centres were overrun by bureaucratic requirements and struggled with different degrees of emotional strain. They were the sole links between the asylum seekers, bureaucracy and wider Italian society. The dependency of the asylum seekers on the CAS staff and their sense of confusion and uncertainty about the future emerged in their contracted, closed body postures. We captured these layers of challenge and pain using the iceberg model.

Iceberg — “above” and “below” the waterline of visibility: an investigation into the layers of challenge and pain

We then used Image Theatre and Social Presencing Theater to get to know and possibly transform the personal and social dimensions of the asylum-seekers. One particular physical body image created by a Nigerian woman showed the isolation and stigmatization she experienced, so the facilitator invited her to intervene in the scene to change the situation and she replied: “The only way to change the situation is to change the color of my skin”.

This part of the project was not free of challenge. We had to go through the initial suspicion of the asylum seekers and sometimes work in very small groups. Towards the end of the first phase, we started exploring the theme of talent both for asylum seekers and local Italians using co planning activities inspired by Dragon Dreaming. This process started to generate greater energy and motivation. The bodies of the asylum seekers started to open up and be more centered. A sense of greater grounding and possibility was expressed.