Para-site. An exercise in surface sampling (21–25 July 2023) is the summer school organised by Simone Trum, co-founder of Team Thursday, for the first edition of the Master's in Visual Communication and Art Direction directed by Mauro Bubbico.

An English workshop inspired by botanical and volcanic patterns of the Etna region and encourages them to approach the surrounding environment with curiosity and a spirit of observation, with the aim of creating a typographical para-object (a neologism born from the union of “object” and “parasite”) meaning an experimentation derived from texture Come on naturalistic elements met during the course of a series of Explorations, which may take the form of a typeface, a digital or analogue graphic artefact, a performance or a 3D object and will go placed in the setting that inspired it (artificially – through rendering, photo montages, collages, illustrations, projections – or really), just like a parasite that feeds on the host organism and thrives within it.

To carry out the projects, we started from’landscape observation and from the collection of visual testimonies (photos, video, drawings, travel notes) through a research phase which will lead us to explore the northern slope of the Etna volcano, amongst Monti Sartorius, the Snow Cave and there 2002 fracture, he Radicepura Garden Festival, the biennial event dedicated to Mediterranean garden architecture held in Giarre, and the monumental Paternò del Toscano Park in Sant'Agata Li Battiati. The collected material was then reviewed, catalogued, selected and manipulated digitally and/or analogue in the subsequent design phase.

The summer school was made possible with the support Fedrigoni and in partnership with Paternò del Toscano Park.