Sic est: the Arteducation of Maestri di Strada video-narrated by a group of adolescentes from the suburbs of Naples

Italy is among the European countries with the highest school drop-out rates. It is well known that extra-curricular activities can foster dropout recovery, strengthening engagement and social ties. The non-profit Association Maestri di Strada (MdS) carries out educational projects in the suburbs of Naples to combat educational wastage, social marginality and deviance, using arteducation and storytelling as devices. MdS organises theatre, music and visual arts workshops, in which around 100 adolescents at psycho-social risk participate every year. Art and beauty enable adolescents who experience school and their neighbourhood as a senseless and painful experience to feel that they are the subjects of their own growth in a shifted and protected space, where they can mend their ties with society. This contribution presents the stages of a work aimed at documenting, narrating and evaluating the art workshops in terms of their impact on the development of a group of adolescents. It was in itself a process of shared artistic creation. In a first step, focused video-recorded narrative interviews were conducted with 13 adolescents who took part in the workshops. From this corpus, subjected to categorical analysis, 5 macro-themes emerged: Outer and Inner Suburbs - Street School - Ties and heavy blows - Arts and Crafts: turning pain into beauty - Sic Est: the time for storytelling. Starting from these macro-themes, a documentary film, Sic Est, was elaborated and edited, which was finally presented to the local educational community and to several social film festivals, where it received positive feedback and awards.