An “Opus” brand for products invented by children; a permanent research laboratory dealing with science, but also with science fiction; an extended consultation to the most important artists and personalities of our time to imagine the future: the Opificio Golinelli looks to the next 50 years with resources, enthusiasm and ambition. Being young in the times of the citadel of knowledge and culture, created in Bologna by the philanthropist Marino Golinelli, contains opportunities unthinkable until yesterday, but the new Opus 2065 project goes beyond the thinkable, recently financed by the entrepreneur with a fund of 30 million euros (in addition to the 51 million already donated) whose destination is guaranteed by a Trust.
This is what Andrea Zanotti, professor of canon law and writer, vice president of the Golinelli Foundation, explains to FIRSTonline. “We address a wide range of young people – he says – the youngest belong to the post-digital generation, they are more familiar with computers than adults and we have to find a language to speak to them or we risk using methods of transmitting the old-fashioned knowledge". Let us give an example: “Can we explain to the children, for two or three months, who were the Assyrian Babylonians? Or do we instead have them build an archaeological field in three dimensions, capable of staging that story?” Opus 2065 will perform an avant-garde function in the training field, looking for the right tools. “We are thinking of experimental classes and we have suggested to the Minister of Education, Stefania Giannini, to use us as hares. We are a streamlined structure, we can become a laboratory for the training system of the whole country".
Art and science are the ingredients of a pedagogical recipe that will be constantly renewed. It sounds like a novel, but we are not far from living in an era in which computers develop machines that are more intelligent than man: "It's true, the post-human party already exists in the USA". On the basis of these premises, a handful of audacious people of knowledge and teaching set out to imagine something more: "The next six months of our activity - announces Zanotti - will be dedicated to the transposition into practice of the ideas that form the basis of Opus 2065 and we will contact great personalities, even in the field of art, for advice. We will be inspired by the best in the world: we should go as far as New York or Calcutta”.
In fact, technical is not the only language that Opus 2065 will speak. “Looking ahead also means feeding on pure thought, scientists and artists are the sides of the same coin and we believe in a humanistic civilization, not inhabited only by technocrats”. In the citadel next to a permanent scientific research center, a permanent center of thought will thus be born, which we could define as science fiction. “2001 A Space Odyssey – observes Zanotti – is a film from 1968 and yet it is still beautiful, because it is fertile, it fertilizes our minds and forces us to think”. The scientist and the artist are the guides chosen to lead teachers and disciples on this journey into the future. Furthermore, Opus 2065 is not only aimed at children and teenagers, but also at university students, up to the age of 28, always with the same objective: to transform creativity into business. “Our school comes from a Humboldtian training system – claims the vice president of the Foundation – we have the University that conceives a product, after which comes the patent, then the prototype, then the investigations to identify a company that can make it their own. But now, after nine months, either an idea is already a product or it remains a dream, because someone has invented the same thing or has surpassed it.
The geometric development we are experiencing makes everything age in a moment”. Perhaps the Opificio has a formula to solve this problem too: keep everything at home. We will soon be able to see “Opus” branded products, obviously in compliance with all the intellectual property rights of the idea. Is this really a possible scenario? “More: an Opus brand would be our pride”.
