SOForest025 initiative at and in collaboration with the Museo Sant’Orsola, with the patronage of the Florentine Metropolitan City, made possible thanks to the support of Parma Agency Group and the French brand AYAQ, in support of the mission of the non profit organization LWCircus, for the development of initiatives based on RESILIENCE, SOCIAL INCLUSION and SUSTAINABILITY in the Mediterranean and in developing countries, involves the temporary installation of a portion of Mediterranean forest at the cloister of Museo Sant’ Orsola, located in the San Lorenzo district, a lively place of public cultural life in the Florentine Metropolitan city, which for the occasion has been transformed into a portion of Mediterranean landscape (composed of Quercus ilex) to underline the dramatic and urgent theme at a global level of the need for reforestation of our soils, to help address the environmental crisis due to ongoing climate change, while at the same time offering the opportunity to temporarily change the haptic perception of the place, thanks to the presence of dozens of individuals of the Mediterranean forest that comes it, thus acting as a small urban green lung.

During the opening day, together with the presence of live artistic performances (curated by the theatre company of deaf actors of Laboratorio Silenzio, based in Milan, the French lithophonist Tony Di Napoli and the Sardinian saxophonist Gavino Murgia), the various protagonists, supporters and experts, with the occasion, raised awareness among visitors on the importance of the fundamental issues relating to RESILIENCE, SOCIAL INCLUSION and SUSTAINABILITY.

Subsequently, in a second phase, starting from a second event scheduled for June 17, the project foresees that the portion of Mediterranean forest will leave Museo Sant’ Orsola to animate a significant part of the historic center of Florence, as a temporary urban reforestation, helping to cool the air, sequester CO2 emissions, counteract the sadly known phenomenon of heat islands, increasingly present in local Florentine life during the summer season.

The project, supported by Parma Agency Group and AYAQ, born within the activities planned by LWCircus-Onlus and its national and international partners, as opening activity and collateral events planned for the BRAL025, Biennial f Resilience, Art and landscape in Asinara, for the exceptional alignment of constellations of architecture and landscape biennials that will be held between Venice, Versailles, Asinara and Barcelona during 2025. 

LWCircus non profit organization promotes the Italian – Mexican Operative Shared Program created during 2016 and focused on experimental modalities looking for new strategies for sustainable urban and rural development and the revitalization of cultural landscapes trough social inclusion, thanks to design methods based on shared practices, choral attitudes and osmotic processes within resilient communities on particular sensitive areas in the Mediterranean and Developing Countries. LWCircus is working since the foundation in between Florence, Rome and Asinara Natural Park, as well as rural villages in Yucatan and China. The mission is the social inclusion trough medium of art in rural, natural and urban contexts, working all over the world with artist, architects and landscape architects trough formula of operative workshops to revitalize places with communities and their minorities. The operative shared workshops stimulate the creation of a multicultural and interdisciplinary flow to exchange knowledge, information, attitudes, skills and real-world know-how through artistic expression and multiple forms of media. LWCircus designed symbiotic and adaptive processes. It made it in the transfigured rural villages of China, as well as in the Sardinian landscape of Asinara island, where the human beings were adapted over the years finding a way to live symbiotically with the natural environment, establishing a delicate equilibrium and in some way protecting the delicate ecosystem, and also in the Yucatan, among the Mayan minorities, whose resilient abilities date back to millenary habits of adaptation to continuous environmental changes or even in Florence, where triggers were necessary to reactivate life correspondences, in between citizens and refugees. In all of this, the protagonist has been always the landscape, the result of the action and interaction between the human and more than human. LWCircus works by means of artistic languages that generate symbolic spaces germinated by temporary choral installations. Although they are made with perishable elements or with time-resistant scraps, these are capable of being real narrative devices in which the historical memory of the places is revisited to reactivate the knowledge of the landscape, undertaking renewed relationships with the landscape itself, a peculiarity of resilient communities.