In order to revisit the project and eventually destroy it, I asked Silvia Bottiroli to accompany the research with her dramaturgical advice.

I had to organise my memories of the process of Special Handling in a research trajectory, written on paper and deliverable to Silvia in order for her to enter in some way the evolution of the research.

The tool to establish a new base to transform the project was pleasure: what point of pleasure I could recognize in the research trajectory? What kind of knowledge do I discover in encounters with people? Could we call that knowledge invisibilized or we need other words to define (or not define) that knowledge?

We came out with an ever emerging list of qualities of knowledge related to stories of people encountered during the previous research; not abstract knowledge but embodied and situated.

Useless, invisible, improbable knowledge. Hidden in plain sight knowledge, discovered by an accidental observation which provokes astonishment by the mere fact that they have always been present but without attention and, once noticed, a shift in perception happens, almost an abrupt slip. Knowledge that can be intercepted but cannot be transmitted and perhaps not even enunciated, that eludes a possibility of categorization, remaining in the opaque. Minimal units of knowledge are useless without the rest of the complex of knowledge or context. Fantastic re-organisations of knowledge that do not respond to any need other than pleasure. Knowledge that emerges just out of the co-presence of people practising a mechanical action. The list could go on and on: whenever a new fact of knowledge appears, a new way of describing or naming it occurs.

Gathering this knowledge, calling knowledge those subtle and indefinable aspects and not having answers to the question: what’s the use of this useless thing I know? It means turning our gaze to a non-productive dimension of knowledge, it means blowing up the criteria according to which knowledge is organised according to the centre/margin or vertex/base distinctions. Attention becomes the tool that allows knowledge to be an ever-open horizon.

 “ Why do you learn to play zither before dying Socrate? 

 S: To learn zither before dying!”

The attempt to organise this ever emerging flow of fact of knowledge brought to avoid immediately a taxonomic way and to prefer the creation of a platform or playground to let the flow   of knowledge free to keep on emerging.

Observing what happened in the previous project, together with Silvia, we created a list of few exercises to propose to a few local communities:  a class of a high school in Collegno, some groups of people gathered through a call, a group of folk dancers active in Torino. The practices proposed had some aspect in commons:

• the derailment from logic into the territory of ‘non-knowing’. An off balance of the logic, creating a non-existent but plausible knowledge/world through an act of fictionality
• situations for a collective negotiation of meaning, situations where a  performative pact of attribution of meaning to something that does not exist is established, a scientific claim of something absurd

• the pleasure as a drive to knowledge
• the not-knowing as a condition for something new to emerge, not-knowing as a form of truth
• an accidental recognition as knowledge of something that was not, a form of sub-power instead of superpowers.

In one of the workshops offered in Lavanderia, I had the chance to meet Alessandro Tollari: former teacher and current Phd in performing art and pedagogy; expert of fiction in educational environment. We decided to proceed in the research together and then the Platypus appeared!