Point Out – A Journey into the Experience of Foreign Students in Italy

There is a growing awareness of the need for and importance of relationships between the various social, economic, scientific, and cultural components that define our time.

Point Out is an attempt to create a point of contact between sociological investigation and artistic research. The central element of this project is the value of relationships in fostering communication between different cultures.

On the occasion of a contemporary art exhibition titled Giochi di luce 1999, held in the spaces of the University of Ferrara, the idea arose to establish a dialogue with the students who frequented the university daily.

My interest was in witnessing and learning about the reality of foreign students, as carriers of another cultural identity. This experience took shape in the production of a video, in which various students from Africa and Europe share their study experiences and their interaction with Italian society through brief interviews.

The resulting video was projected continuously inside the university for the duration of the exhibition. The project was supported by the Municipality of Ferrara and the Department of Youth Policies, in collaboration with the Interfaculty Services Center of the University of Ferrara.

The video was produced at the Cinema Center of the Municipality.

Why focus on foreign students? Why their challenges with integration? Why their relationship with the city and the university?

Foreign students arriving in Italy are a sign of a new openness within our society.

This openness toward other cultural realities has emerged more broadly over the last twenty years, during which Italy has been directly affected by a growing flow of immigration from African, Arab, and Eastern European countries, and most recently in connection with the conflicts in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia.

Many efforts are underway to address these new and often complex challenges.

I believe these students represent a will and a desire for coexistence and mutual respect.

Too often today, discussions of cultural education within the broader framework of youth policies fail to consider the presence of these “other” cultural identities and their particular struggles.

A broad, global cultural perspective is not sufficient to understand what is happening all around us. I believe that today, it is essential to re-establish a new relationship with reality—one rooted in awareness and offering the opportunity to feel truly alive in this renewal.

Our cities, the backdrop of these transformations, are often in the hands of architects and surveyors… but we need more than buildings that simply stand upright! Reality is more complex and must be connected to diverse stimuli and needs, and integrated with increasingly broad and specific expertise in every field of knowledge.

What is needed, therefore, is a revitalization of the concept of place as a space for communication, where each participant can recognize themselves and actively take part in this process of coming together and development.

“... it was very hard to find a place to live, as soon as they heard your foreign accent on the phone... they would hang up.”
(from the video Point Out, 1999)

—Pier Paolo Coro