The world of hospitality in Italy is composite, mobile, and has been subject to continuous redefinitions over the last decade. Numerous studies have highlighted the structural limits of a system in which, although widespread “good practices”, denounce the total arbitrariness of the fate of those who find themselves living this system. The segregation, material and symbolic, to which refugee people are subjected, responds to the need to produce “order” through the control of a subject considered naturally dangerous. But even when the refugee, or in general the migrant person, is not seen as a danger, he is still thought of as a “deficient subject”, someone who lacks skills and resources – linguistic, intellectual, material). As a consequence, the reception becomes the synonym of a service to be dedicated to a subject in minority to make up for his shortcomings. The mixture of these two aspects, segregation and depersonalization, is critical not only for the beneficiaries of the system, subject to exclusion and infantilisation that diminishes the possibility of carrying out projects of autonomy, but also in terms of social impact. Without forgetting that there is a dimension of material needs to be met, it is good to understand that reception is always a relationship. In this sense, it is necessary that reception also becomes a job with, on and from local citizenship. The mechanisms of segregation, in fact, by strengthening the separation between groups, are jointly responsible for the xenophobic and racist relentlessness towards migrants and the reception system itself.

In a context such as the one we are facing today, family care is an innovative model to facilitate social inclusion and develop daily strategies of cohesion, solidarity and anti-racism. Through the experiences of coexistence, who we are and who we are is questioned, renegotiated and reinvented.

In this way, the “we” and the “they” stop being something given, something that we think we are by birth – a nationality, a color, a religion, an economic condition – to become an “us” that you choose, daily, in and through the relationship.

This talk is part of the program of Design Your Community.