Butterfly Effect

The Arsenale is a house that has the breath of the world. In a place like this you don't experience history as a spectator, but it immerses you up to your neck and makes you vibrate, rejoice, cry with all of humanity. At the end of February with the start of the war in Ukraine there was a very powerful butterfly effect on the life of our house.

Tons of aid offered by unknown hands to be sent 2,500 km away; spaces to be equipped to welcome the first refugees on the run; thousands of emails with requests and offers of help, people of all ages never seen before spending hours in the cold in the courtyard preparing aid. An impressive number of phone calls: «Help me get a mother here with her children»; «I have a minibus to bring aid and on the way back I can load people»; "I have accommodation to make available"; "I'm Russian, I've lived in Italy for a long time, I'm ashamed of what's happening."

In those months, the Municipality of Turin also asked us for a hand in managing talks with families available for hospitality. This is how this adventure of going house to house began. We met young and old couples, single people and families with children, some driven by the need to respond with good to all the evil they were witnessing, some out of a sense of solidarity and fraternity. Most with modest accommodation and simply an extra room. Someone willing to even give up their room and sleep on the sofa. We met several people aware of what it means to carry on a welcome; other moves from a sincere impulse of generosity on which it is however essential to work so as not to transform the shared space into a trap for oneself and for others. Living at the Arsenale, I learned that emotion is a good thing, but a moved heart that doesn't set thoughts in motion can be dangerous. Hospitality is not a feeling, it affects and involves the whole person, of those who welcome and those who are welcomed.

The home is a fundamental vital space, opening it to those in difficulty is noble, but it cannot be a one-way gesture. Even for those who are welcomed, being able to have a space in which not to feel perpetually a guest is vital. To welcome you need to be humble, accepting to enter a process of confrontation with those who have more experience, otherwise you risk getting burned and burning the other and locking yourself up on the defensive.


Simona Pagani
NP August / September 2022