After two intense months traveling around Europe – between D’Artagnan exhibits, “musical interludes”, meetings with artists, contacts and agreements for the ICBIE, fund-raising, including the dream of constructing a cinema/theater for Ribeira, and finally, a failed attempt to sell some land in Italy, to raise enough money to begin building the theater – here I am back in Salvador. I found things tranquil and under control, with Daniele Dattilo busy on both fronts of his English and French lessons. Marlene is exuberantly taking care of her Italian class. The computer courses are solidly underway. The outstanding Hapkido course, taught by Maestro Augusto; and for our Italian guests, the samba and capoeira courses have an exceptional teacher, Patricia, the daughter of Mestre Pedro, capoeira master of the Alagados favela (who is currently in bad health, and it looks like we will have to try and help him). Maddalena, along with Lorenza are organizing a cycle of Italian Cuisine Tuesdays, explaining the basic elements of our culinary art, followed by the description of typical Mediterranean recipes.
Right now, about a hundred people are frequenting our institute: students, volunteers, teachers and guests. This is already a terrific success, given that we never seriously advertised or promoted our activities, beyond the odd poster or bulletin tacked to our wall, or maybe a few flyers distributed locally, or simply by the word of mouth.
To be honest, I also have to talk about the less-than-positive aspects. I have noticed that the choral singing course had a bumpy ride during my absence, because my substitute had some family and health problems. Now it is urgent to get the situation back under control, and from the first of September, get the loose ends tied back together and reconstruct the group spirit. Our other sticking point is the snail’s pace of progress in cataloging our library collection, caused by a lack of both money and adequate personnel.
Here in Brazil, the 20th of July marks the beginning of winter holidays (the equivalent of our Christmas), and schools close for 20/25 days. We, too, will close a few courses, mainly in order to give more space to our numerous guests (part of our activity as an art hostel) who will be coming for their summer vacations during late July and all of August. We’re already booked full! Some of our guests are volunteers who will assist us in various small jobs and projects, according to their resources and special talents.
Regular courses will begin again in September, continuing until December/January, our second semester.
Personally, I have decided to make an exception to the closure of nearly everything, because our good man Bogus has done an extraordinary job in transferring old video cassettes into DVDs, so starting next week, we’re beginning a mini-series, open to the public, showing artistically significant films every Saturday at 5:30 PM.
Greetings to all,
PIETRO GALLINA
(translation by Roy Zimmerman)
