This is the School of Losing Time

About Us

Chiara Basile

Urban researcher, project manager and designer but above all homo persona ludens. She uses playing as a practice of social transformation and as an accessible tool for collective reflection. She loves to explore - urban and alpine places; and the meanings and signifiers of things. And she seeks and experiments, better if together, with the syntaxes, languages and narratives that represent them.

Martina Dragoni

Born and raised in the lower Po Valley, she decides to follow the Po river to Turin. Here she starts her professional career in the field of urban regeneration, care of territories and their communities through the tools that best suit her: communication, storytelling, audience and community engagement. When she can, she enjoys mixing her beginner’s passions for good food, publishing and contemporary art.

an organisation that creates projects and asks fundamental questions about urban culture

and about the politics and policies of cities by bringing into dialogue people from the built environment disciplines (architects, urban planners, as well as academics and civil society groups) with actors of the diverse spheres of visual arts.

​TSoLT explores processes of commoning in the interstice and coalition zone between architecture, arts and politics.
Through the diverse projects TSoLT aims at focusing on PLAY as a strategy for using TIME within dynamics outside the market logics, and thus, as a way to start deconstructing our mindset of always having to be productive when using our TIME.

Chiara Basile

Urban researcher, project manager and designer but above all homo persona ludens. She uses playing as a practice of social transformation and as an accessible tool for collective reflection. She loves to explore - urban and alpine places; and the meanings and signifiers of things. And she seeks and experiments, better if together, with the syntaxes, languages and narratives that represent them.

Martina Dragoni

Born and raised in the lower Po Valley, she decides to follow the Po river to Turin. Here she starts her professional career in the field of urban regeneration, care of territories and their communities through the tools that best suit her: communication, storytelling, audience and community engagement. When she can, she enjoys mixing her beginner’s passions for good food, publishing and contemporary art.

Laura Esteban

Service and product designer. Big-picture thinker and behaviour observer. Foodie and knitting enthusiast. She is passionate about design and it’s power to foster co-creation and enable interactions, connecting the dots between people and things.

Irene Nequinio

Architect. Passionate about maps, she studies the city by cycling and dreams of spaces for everyone. She is always looking in the air because she is constantly looking for stories to tell with her camera.

Angela Maria Osorio Mendez

Urban researcher and full time dreamer and activist (queer transfeminist and commoner). Mixing together urban sociology and architecture, this person works as intercultural mediator co-creating collective projects that engage in social change through arts and research.

As described by Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens:

“we might call [play] a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life […] connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it […] It promotes the formation of social groupings […]”[1]. In this way, TSoLT is a project that aims to collaboratively construct ourselves as homines ludentes, and our quotidian life as one extraordinary (thinking of ordinary as a social environment commodified all the way down[2]). For doing so, TSoLT uses diverse projects that enables participants to turn us all into accomplices in the process of imagining, creating, and living different ways to lose TIME, to do politcs and to develop critical thinking, starting to construct in this way “The Beginning of History” (De Angelis: 2007), and thus activating a society of commoners for future projects.

As founder of this cultural association we are a two “mulier ludens” team, Angela María Osorio Méndez born and raised in Bogotá, and Chiara Basile, Italian of Turin. We are educated as architects and hold PhDs in Urban Studies and Urban and Regional development.
We both believe in commoning as the beginning of thinking of life outside the commodities web in which apparently we are trapped today as a society. We both believe in PLAYing as an important strategy for de-naturalizing structures (such as naturalised capitalist dynamics) that blind us from thinking other possible ways of living together. Online and offline open sources tools and creative commons resources are our basic interactive tool-kit; writers such as Seneca, Cortazar and Calvino and scholars as Constant, De Angelis, Huizinga, Fraser, Polanyi, have largely influenced our way of thinking.