Trust the Process | Ep.1 - Chloé Malcotti

Trust the Process is a podcast about socially engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventional nature of artistic processes and, more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask, Pay, Trust the Artist campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts.

The guest of this first episode is the French artist Chloé Malcotti, director of Medusa, a film that explores the case of Rosignano Solvay, a small Italian coastal town where industrial capitalism has deeply affected both the natural ecosystem and the collective identity of its residents.

What happens when residents’ mindsets are challenged and sparked into imagining alternative scenarios that question the unfairness of a given situation? And where does change begin?

Chloé’s words will help you understand what makes Medusa an exemplary case of how socially engaged artistic practices can challenge social issues by emphasising process, dialogue, and collective action — fostering local ownership, social cohesion, and active citizenship through art.

Special guest:

Chloé Malcotti

Music credits:

Original music by Kerem Çelikoğlu

Episode produced and hosted by:

Sara Bandinu, Culture Action Europe

This podcast aims to spark an ongoing conversation around socially engaged arts — one we hope to nurture by collecting grounded stories of change-making. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch at sara@cultureactioneurope.org — I would love to hear from you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hi, I'm Sarah from Culture Action Europe and welcome to Trust the Process, a podcast about socially engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventionality of artistic processes and more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask They Trust the Artists campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Social Engaged Arts. When we mention social engaged arts, we refer to collaborative community-centered practices where artists and participants co-create artistic responses to social, environmental, and political issues. In this space, artists and cultural workers share their experiences and reflections on how they foster local ownership and active citizenship through art and how their work creates change-making impact, giving voice to both the successes and the challenges encountered along the way. Enjoy listening. The background chatter you can hear comes from the end of a special screening hosted by Collective Encadre, an independent film club based in Brussels. For this first episode, I'm taking you with me into the aftermath of the screening of Medusa, a film by the French director and artist Chloé Malcotti. Medusa is a deeply sensory poetic film that explores the environmental damage suffered by the Italian town of Rosignano. For over a century, the presence of Solvay, a multinational specialized in baking soda production, has profoundly shaped not only the land, but also the bodies and lives of the people who live there. The film shows schools, leisure spaces, even workers' clubs founded by the same company, revealing how deeply it has become woven into the town's fabric. So much so that a common story has taken hold, that before Souva, there was nothing. In Medusa, it's the inhabitants themselves who push back against this idea. The film opens up space for other ways of seeing, loosening the grip of this inherited narrative. It does it through a creative process that directly involved residents, turning them into co-creators of the stories told in the film. The director, Chloe Malcotti, whose voice you're here shortly, will tell us more about how all of this came together.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

It's not just a film. So Medusa, I did it in 2021. I finished it because it was uh I think like a four-year process. Yeah, at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um yeah, it was a four-year process, and uh and first uh I went there, I went to Rossignano Medusa, it's taking place in Rossignano in Italy, Rossignano Solve. And I went there um by for when I followed uh the advice of a friend, an Italian friend that I met here in Brussels, and I was finishing a film, like uh my first um like linear film, like because before I was doing more installation, so it was the first time that I was doing like a film with a beginning and an end. And um when I finished this film, I I told to my friend, because it's really something that I was feeling strongly, that um there is something that I wanted to talk about with this film that I didn't I was notable because this film, in fact, was not about that, and I discovered it when I was doing the film, and so I was telling him what it was, like this like I was looking for a certain type of colour that was linked to the uh to an emotion that stay in a place, and uh that was linked also to uh the history and the feelings that of a certain um uh worker uh yeah it's worker, yeah, uh like a worker history uh with um a factory, etc. And it told me, Ah, uh maybe you should come uh with me to Rosignano Solve, maybe you're gonna find this colour there, and it's how I went there, and uh and it was true.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Later on, when I asked Chloe what led her to make this film about Rosignano, she spoke about how it had spontaneously grown out of a feeling of necessary response to what she described as a kind of paralysis in the face of disaster. Something she linked to the romantic concept of the sublime, that uneasy blend of awe and fear that is so powerfully embodied by Rosignano's strikingly white beaches, an unnatural whiteness shaped by more than a century of chemical discharge from Solvay, and one that has, ironically, turned them into a much-loved seaside touristic destination. In a place where awareness of pollution does not seem to stop visitors from filling the shoreline, nor residents from continuing their everyday lives alongside it, Claire felt the need to intervene differently. She chose to work through artistic practice as a way of mobilizing the community for its ability to spark imagination, to bring people together and to nurture a shared sense of belonging. For her, this collective dimension is not separate from making art. It lies at the very heart of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

But um like an artist, like the aesthetic um feeling or pleasure that we can have from aesthetic form, um should start in the making of this form. And um in order to understand really what is art, and art is not just the will of one person that makes something. Sometimes it's like that, you make a drawing, you need to express something, and it's fine, but film is about collective. A film is a collective practice. So, what type of collective do you create when you do it? And this for me is really important, like if you want to make a film like that have a subject that is uh of course like critique criticizing uh capitalism and in this case like uh industrial capitalism, your your the the way you make it, like the gestures, like what you what like how you create the collective that you are working it, it should also reflect the thought. Like, are you doing it like an industry? So you are the boss and uh all the person is a worker and they are under your order and your vision, or no, you you work already about the subject inside the making of the film. And so for me it was very important because if not you create exactly what the beach does, the dissociation thing. Okay, we have a beach that is beautiful, but in fact it's disaster. Okay, we have a film that is speaking about like uh a subject that is super polite like uh engaged, but in fact the making of the film is completely archical. So you create a dissociation, and I think uh what artists try to do is to re-put together the sense, like sense, like sensitivity, but also the sense of things. Like I do that because it makes sense, like every gesture for of an of an artwork can be seen as uh creating sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Do you want to say a few words about the process?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Yeah, uh so I was wondering a lot like how I will work there, um, also because I was not speaking Italian at all at this moment, and so it was a really big uh big topic. But um like uh yeah, like how I went to the Impro Theatre because before I was not working, I never used that before. Uh it was I understood at one point quite clearly um that this film or this place was a lot about imaginary. Like we had to walk in the imaginary field, because uh when I arrived there, always people were telling me there was nothing, there were nothing before solve. And that I thought, like, okay, if you cannot imagine a past without the industry, how you can imagine a future without it if your past is completely colonized by the industry. So I was like, okay, so we have to work on really the imaginary to try to understand like what is made of this past, like why people there think like that, because they were something before the industry. Um, in order after to maybe we can work on the the future, another way to think the place. And like that, with that, we can understand exactly what are the emotions, the feelings, the joys, anger related to the space and the things that were maybe not listened before. And so this was I was like, okay, we need to work with improvisation, like that imaginary can come. And uh and after I was like, okay, um, in order to have a free, like a more free imaginary, I need to work with kids, uh, but not too young, because I needed also people that can have a politicized uh point of view. And so I decided to work with teenagers, and so I met like uh a teacher of a school uh that bring like uh like bring me into one of his class and I spoke about the project, and uh eight teenagers were agreed to participate, and uh and uh and yeah, at the end they were just six that they stayed. And it was a workshop, like it was two times a week uh for two months. And um, and so I was bringing them, uh I was working with them um with archive that I found in the archive of the city, and I was asking them to reenact it, for example, like what happened uh during this archive, like what happened in this council, for example, and they were reenacting it. And also sometimes it was just about like their own imaginary of the future or unimaginary of the past. We were working about the beliefs that they had, like, for example, like there was nothing before Solve. So we're like, okay, this is a belief, like okay, let's play it and let's try to see if there is not another way uh to write this belief. Maybe it's not just that, it's maybe it's something else. And so after that, like um I was assisted, assisted uh by uh uh my friend, uh the one that brings me there, uh, that is Italian, and that was translating me like at night, we were translating like all the thoughts, like all the words that was exchanged during the the moment of working, the workshop. And after that, so we were translating everything, and um, and so because we were doing this for me to understand what was happening after I was like, Oh, okay, but in fact it's the beginning of a script, and so uh I was like, Okay, it's like that, we're gonna walk, like we're gonna work uh and use what we did for the workshop because I didn't know really how to do it after. But in fact, I was like, okay, it's a script. So after I really just edit uh all the the what the words that they say in the workshop, but I just edited like I would edit a film, and um and after I I found the coherence, I found a film that will like that came from it, and I um show them the script, this like script, like pre-script.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Um and after we re-um write pieces of it because they were like, oh no, I don't I don't see that through these creative workshops, residents were not only given space to begin shifting the collective imagination around Rosignano, they were also given a powerful sense of shared authorship over the narratives of their own reality, a space in which to imagine and therefore to act, to consider different futures for the place they inhabit, and that is no small thing. But impact is not always straightforward, it does not move in a single direction, nor does it always take the shape we might expect. So when I asked Chloe what happened next, what the film's journey had been and how it had met the community once it was finished, her answer revealed something more complex.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

And so uh so this I I don't know. Um in Rossignano, like the film never been uh shown. Ah no, because uh the person that was in that is in charge of that refused. So yeah, so I think they are really not ready uh to to to show it. And uh but everyone, of course, that were participating to the film they they showed they saw the film and they were even in the premiere in Amsterdam at IFA. But in Rocinano, no. And uh and yeah, cannot f I cannot force it.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Did you get anything from Solvay afterwards?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Or you never engage in a I never engage with them and also I always yeah, I never tried to let them know that I was doing a film about this speech because I wanted I didn't want it any problem for nothing. Yeah. But um and also like uh yeah, like I think they have other big fish, bigger fish to to catch. But um, but yeah, so the impact, uh the the the most like the biggest impact that I had after that I saw after the film is when I show it uh to the biennial in uh in Congo in Lubumbashi. Oh okay. And there it was like because sometimes when you show it in festivals, that the public it's like a middle class, high middle class person, so they don't know what it is to live in a place where there is factory. I am from like a place where there is factory. So I I know, I feel like I understand it, what people say uh when they say something like that. But in in the festival they don't understand always. Like is it for example they don't understand the lovers? Then everyone when I showed it in uh in Congo, uh in Lubumbashi, uh they all understood super well this character. Then when I show it in festivals, they don't understand it. Yeah, because they don't get what it what she's speaking about it. And um so yeah, it's when when I show it uh in Lubumbashi, it was really great because uh people are leaving that like every day, uh like the an industry that pollutes the water, that pollutes their skin, that pollutes uh their being, like everything they are living with that every day. So they were really like uh the conversation was super strong after. And uh so yeah, it's really dependent on the public. Like you have different types of conversation, yeah, and different type of impacts. And I think what I felt in uh Lubumbashi, it was the impact was a kind of uh you are not alone. Like it's this feeling that after the film, like oh okay, we are not alone, and there is maybe way to think um a way out through the imaginary. Uh, because the the film does not give a way like a way out because it's a big of a thing, like capitalism. But it just for me the film was really about like just make us feel what is pollution, like on in our body, in our bones, in order for us when we feel it to react and to say set up.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

After everything we've heard, it becomes clear that Medusa is not just a film. It is a powerful example of socially engaged artistic practice, a blend of collective and creative processes that grew out of a shared journey rooted in the desire to open up spaces where change can begin to take form. Not only in Rosignano, but echoing in the conversations it has sparked across different geographies, where these exchanges begin to plant the seeds of a shared sense of agency. And in that feeling, in that shared recognition, something begins to shift. You have been listening to Trust the Process, a podcast on socially engaged arts that is part of the Ask Pay Trust the Artist campaign by Culture Action Europe, realized with the support of the Alliance for Socied Arts. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch. You can find my contact details in the episode description. Before we wrap up, a few credits. I'd like to thank all the artists, curators, and cultural workers who opened up and shared their stories with me. Thanks as well to everyone who supported me and offered advice along the way. Thanks to Kerem Cherikogru, author of the music of this podcast. And finally, a big thanks to you for listening all the way through. See you in the next episode.