Stories are everywhere: they shape the way we see the world, fuel our desires, influence our decisions, and guide our behaviors. In this context, storytelling has become a cultural and political imperative. Why Stories is a research laboratory entirely dedicated to the arts of storytelling. It supports anyone who wishes to use narrative as a catalyst for creation, critical thinking, and action. Its mission is simple: to give everyone the means to tell the world with accuracy, complexity, and imagination.
This intensive three-month program is built on a teaching approach that brings together the arts, the humanities, and contemporary narrative practices. It provides participants with the tools to understand the world through the stories that shape it—and to imagine new ones. Because storytelling is an act that shapes the way we live together, Why Stories regards narrative as a common good and a civic practice. By making the tools of storytelling accessible to as many people as possible, it helps foster narratives that expand the realm of possibility, enrich democratic debate, and ultimately transform the way we understand, think about, and act in the world.
The theatre is an ancient tool. Far from being merely a space of representation, theatre can also be experienced as a laboratory for exploring other ways of acting. It is not a place of “pretending,” but a place of experience and truth. A place where human beings can rekindle the mystery of being a living body, on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. Together with Gestalt therapist Marie José de Aguair, we will explore this form of intelligence that might be called organicity. By cultivating presence to oneself, to others, and to the environment, we will attend to what emerges in the present moment, at the boundary of contact.
When a human being connects with this organic current, their way of being changes. It is no longer the mind that commands while the body obeys: sensation, emotion, awareness, and action recover their continuity. The actor – that is, the human being in action – is often the first to be surprised: it is me, and at the same time it is something beyond me. One experiences being fully oneself while also being deeply connected with others. Through an exploration of the body, the voice, and relationship, these workshops invite participants to cultivate their capacity for attention and to allow themselves to be transformed by experience.
The current state of the world calls for a complete rethinking of the way we act. At the same time, the overwhelming abundance of information creates a profound sense of uncertainty: where does the noise come from? How can we distinguish the signals that truly matter? Above all, are we capable of acting accordingly and navigating the transformations already underway? Looking beyond the noisy, overcrowded present is a natural human impulse, yet the horizon seems to recede as the present grows ever denser. The challenge is no longer so much to predict the future as to develop the ability to recognize it while it is taking shape.
Ekimetrics responds to this need by using algorithms to collect billions of pieces of data, in an attempt to identify signals in the flow. From March to November 2019, Nour Awada and Luca Giacomoni conducted an immersion study involving personal interviews with thirteen data scientists and weekly workshops focusing on a key issue: when it comes to interpreting past data, what information is valuable and what is unimportant? In other words, how do you separate the noise from the signal?