LAY SONG

When, about 25 years ago or so, Saman was founded the world went round a certain direction. At that time it could go round on the other direction or don’t go round at all. On other words, life could still be invented.

It was said then, that work would be always less heavy and that, soon, the robot could have been side by side with men in the heavier and repetitive work and in the more fastidious tasks.

Saman meant and means “song” and in the joy expressed in such term, it has been always tried to translate it in the daily actions.

It was said then, and it is still said now, that it was luxurious to live in Saman just to demonstrate that Saman distinguished itself from other organizations for having amended and sent off from its own existence that corollary of strange and unclear concepts that, on the contrary, followed many associative realities. The guilty feelings, logic of regret and the suffering mystic represented and represent still today for us distant and not understandable terminologies and concepts.

At that time it was told that the drug addict had already tried hell and should be tried to offer him paradise. In earth, not in a future life.

Saman was laic yesterday and today, of these times, reaffirms more that ever making part of it. We are laic and so open to doubt. To scientific doubt and to someone else’s truth. We listen, we listen with pleasure, but we challenge anyone with our value paradigm that probably do not coincide with great part of the present paradigm on the associations world. And, as well as other associations, we claim our unsuppressed need to move inside discomfort with the same confidence that we move inside easiness.
Because, in the end, the violence of exclusion is not different from the blackmail of inclusion.
Because, in the end, we dislike everything that smells of single thought and absolute or even worse revealed truth.

What does remain then? remains the capacity to be inside the mutating social processes that imply, almost always, putting oneself in discussion. Which implies the need to study, always, the dynamics and logics implied to such processes.
Play, study, passion and competence along the years have represented Saman’s pathway. Combined with listening and receiving have rendered the structures of today and in the colorful organization that we have given birth to. But many challenges are waiting for us.

One, of the most important, is related with the interventions for consumers. Consumers that come either from extreme social and relational poverty or from richness or from the also extreme desire to become rich.

Another, not less important regards the recovering the luxury of living in Saman. The song that shells itself in dream, dream that becomes true and it doesn’t matter if is not in tune with what others think or aspire.

In a last analysis we do worry of not becoming like robots.

Achille Saletti
Saman
Milano, 21 July 2005