A month of urban games to promote the candidacy of Matera for the 2019 European Capital of Culture.
In spring, 2013 we received an email from Andrea Paoletti, a friend who had recently moved to Matera, Basilicata: “Guys, a new interesting public tender is out!”
In fact the Matera 2019 Committee had just announced a call for the creation of a game that could activate and engage a young audience on the themes and contents of the Matera Candidacy, even outside the Matera city boundaries, actually targeting the whole population of the Basilicata region.
It sounded like an impossible mission, but in a few days we had an idea that might work.
Why not bring in Basilicata young creative people from all across Europe, have them play for a week in various Basilicata city neighborhoods, and have a local resident host them during their stay? We decided to apply for the tender together with Casa Netural, Andrea’s association, and we won! We had no time to celebrate as we already had to start with the call: we need to find 120 creative people across Europe who wanted to spend their holidays in Lucania.
In less than a week hundreds of nominations arrive, people from all over Europe want to participate.
We have people from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Denmark, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgary, Spain, Portugal, USA, Lithuania, Georgia, and of course from every region of Italy!
The active cities will be Policoro, Melfi, Potenza and Matera.
The games will begin August 3 and will end on October 2 and we will have 30 creative activities each week.
The energy and the interactions that BBGames generated were amazing!
We organized neighborhood dinners with more than 400 people in attendance where new love stories were born, after the games some European players decided to move to Basilicata for a living and – most importantly – our traveling circus helped the Committee: Matera won the competition and will be European Capital of Culture in 2019!
