RepIdee, Ilaria Cucchi and the workshop with young people: “We will not be silent anymore”

“I promise not to turn away.” The girl who made her commitment to the future by sticking it on the white board of the “Sala Atti” is the same one who spoke several times during the workshop. At Palazzo Re Enzo we came to hear about it and it ended up being the first to speak. Like all the others who participated in the initiative with Ilaria Cucchi and with the deputy director of Repubblica, Carlo Bonini. An interactive group work, starting from the theme of denied rights, which is as topical as ever. It went as the director Maurizio Molinari had foreseen, when “looking at the social networks”, as he explained yesterday afternoon, he changed the classic formula of RepIdee, including workshops in the program.

“The strength of social media – he said – is the interaction, the conversation. So I thought we do events in which we don’t sit and listen as we used to watch television. Let’s make one speak, react and converse as it happens. online. This is how we grow, that we look to the future “.

A dozen round tables, five people sitting around each one, paper and markers. It begins by telling a powerful, emblematic story. Like that of Stefano Cucchi, beaten to death in a carabinieri barracks. An ordeal even after death, made up of silences, misdirection, complicity and, indeed, denied rights. His sister Ilaria, who fought for 13 years for justice, and Carlo Bonini, who investigated and told that case as a reporter and writer, talk about it. A few minutes only to launch the reflection on the responsibilities of institutions, apparatuses and, in general, of society.

Each table becomes a part of that same society and is invited to look within. One table represents parliament, another is the table of the police, and then there is that of the media, intellectuals, artists and so on. Bonini takes place in one and Ilaria Cucchi in another, they are part of the confrontation. The lawyer Fabio Anselmo also arrives, who has fought in every procedural phase of the case.

Guests are asked to imagine themselves in the future, in 2027. Thus each group begins to reflect, to discuss, to speak, to listen and to synthesize. What needs to be changed so that there is no longer a Cucchi case? What could be done to avoid it? Where did the system fail? The tables become workshops, projections. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. In the future it will perhaps be worse for the rights, or not. It is not important from what point of view you look at tomorrow, but it is essential to discuss it, understand it, ask questions. Three hours fly by and in the end they are summed up in a sort of plenum. “We need more transparency” among the police, “they protect themselves”. Artists need to be “less self-referential and tell stories in a way that people understand.”

Journalists “must not be prejudiced”, they must “write to form opinions, not be condescending to mass opinions”. Politics “must be participated”, “more training” is needed. Many ideas, but above all a new awareness built together. So in the end someone on the blackboard writes: “I will not be silent anymore when I have something to say”, “I will not be indifferent anymore”.