Valeria Schiavone. Re-Agire, Free to Leave, Free to Stay, Migration of Welcome

Valeria Schiavone, psychoanalyst and trainer, member of the Italian association Reagire, works with social cooperatives that support migrants locally. She promotes a clinical approach to truly welcoming the other, in all the complexity of their subjective experience, resisting categorization (even well-intentioned) and without forcing their desire. This long-term work forms the basis of an open sense of belonging, countering the dominant fantasies of identity and the prevailing security-driven impulses. It is a “clinical practice of the void,” grounded in a “virtuous negativity” capable of allowing the subject to emerge without fixing them in imaginary identities (even so-called “resilient” ones), and of establishing a method based on acknowledging and testifying to error. The aim is the political construction of a shared space of non-identitarian belonging, offering potential spaces that can reactivate the life of the individual and of the groups in which they freely choose to participate.