Music as a catalyser of change through a new age education
A conversation between Valentino Barrioseta, founder and CEO of NGO Bridges for Music, and Adama Sanneh, Moleskine Foundation CEO
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Adama Sanneh: Valentino, you have one of the most interesting stories that I’ve heard recently. We met in Mozambique for a work trip. We started talking. I remember everybody was saying “Oh, you got to meet Valentino, you got to meet Valentino”. And I said, happy to meet Valentino. Why should I meet Valentino? Well, because out of nothing, he created one of the most interesting academies that you can find around. And then I had the chance to come at the school and to see the school. And I was so impressed. I come and I see one of the most advanced educational programs that I’ve seen around. So, in order to share with everybody else a little bit what you have created maybe, Valentino, can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you move to be one of the actually most influential people behind the scene in a field of electronic music, to create not only a music academy but a music academy that embraces some of the most advanced educational approach that is out there.
Valentino Barrioseta: Well, I think, I was actually talking with a friend earlier about this. I think industries are often disrupted or reshaped by outsiders of the industry itself. So, someone that has been in education all his life might not be able to see outside of the box, whereas someone that comes from a different, completely different industry with a completely different angle instead of tools might be able to bring a fresh approach and new ideas that can really reshuffle the whole education industry. Maybe. I mean, obviously, those are big words, but in our little community that’s why we’re trying to do, and I’ve been always passionate about self-development and coaching, despite my background which I know sounds a bit shallower and entertainment detaining than education. But even when I was promoting events and running clubs and everything and all that stuff, I was always very focused on human innate talent and human development. And that’s been always my passion from reading books to becoming a certified life coach to starting an LP. I also remember as our mindfulness teacher, so I’ve kind of been piling out all of those things. And I think with Bridges for Music, everything kind of came together. But going back to the to the beginning of everything, I was working in the music industry for 20 years, started from throwing parties when I was at university as a promoter and then running some of them, I would say biggest or most legendary clubs in Spain. And that at some point became a bit shallow to me.
I studied music because I believed in the community element of music, bringing people together, sharing with my community or my group of friends, artists that I really believed in or that I really loved and bringing them to my city. I used to live in Valencia, and I would love to bring international artists that never played there to my city. And like that was my real reasons of why I studied music. I believe in the power of music. As cliche as it sounds. Now, when you’re in this business, it becomes a bit of a show business and you are surrounded by these VIPs and a bottle service and constant egotistic behaviors around music that didn’t really resonate, left me quite empty, actually, to be honest. I was earning good money, obviously, and meeting a lot of great people from all over the world, celebrities, big artists, you name it. But I was really disconnected of the reasons why I started in the music industry at first. And I took a sabbatical year, which I think is an amazing thing to do — if anyone can at some point in the midlife — and arrived first in Brazil, met a guy that was running a DJ school from a favela there in Rio de Janeiro called Rocinha, and I really felt inspired by his work and how he was keeping the youth really motivated and driven by teaching them how to deejay, which to me was a bit of a meaningless art after so many years in the scene. And I had felt a little bit, kind of disappointed or a little bit disillusioned maybe is the best word with the industry that I belong to. And this guy was doing such a great job — he had like ten kids with old gear, learning how to deejay, and I was really inspired by him. He said he was really struggling to buy a new mixer. And I thought, Jesus, if any of the gear brands that we work with, like Pioneer DJ, for example, would love to send him some equipment, pretty much. And it would make such a difference in this community, right, to have brand new equipment for all the kids. So, I connected him with a few brands and shipped him some gear. I was over the moon and I realized that was kind of the seed of the whole idea behind Bridges for Music, that there’s such an amazing passion out there for moving communities forward through art and creativity and music. But unfortunately, all these community leaders like this guy, his name is Zezinho, but unfortunately don’t have the connections with big brands, with big companies that can really give them the resources. And also that wouldn’t happen at a time in history when electronic dance music was becoming the new genre and world like DJs were becoming the new rock stars, festivals were growing massively around the world and I felt like the industry needed a platform that connected them with people like to see you in, like a platform that could connect all these brands and all these festivals and all these big artists to people like him that was doing the work in the trenches, and really trying to make a difference through music.
And that’s how the beginning of Bridges for Music came about. And then I traveled to South Africa. Obviously today there’s no secret around the incredible house music scene in South Africa, which is being spearheaded by Black Coffee and all these South African acts that are now taking the world. But back then, it was not that known. And I was really, really surprised when I arrived to a township called Langa in Cape Town, which you have visited, where the school is now sitting. And you and I arrived there, and I saw these super young kids producing incredible house music with super old speakers and super old gear literally from a shack. They were bedroom studio producers in a shack producing the most incredible house music I had heard before. And that was quite shocking because we associate electronic music with big cities, cosmopolitan places like Berlin or Chicago, New York, Ibiza, obviously, but you never would expect to hear it coming from a shack in the township in South Africa. And it was really impressive. I met Black Coffee back then. I was like eight years ago, and I was super inspired by how young kids looked up to him. And I realized the power that he had to influence the youth and to make an impact in these communities where he was a role model. Already then, I mean, imagine now, when he’s kind of conquered the world and became has become one of the biggest artists in the world. So, that kind of reinforce that the seed was planted in Brazil. And I felt I have to organize some tours in South Africa with big artists that are close friends of mine to do tours that kind of bring it beyond the party and leave some inspiration behind. So, we created this tour that had some workshop educational component in the townships. And then we did some normal fundraising events on the side that would raise funds to support local talent to play around the world, afterwards through a scholarship program. So, I started bringing — like well together with a lot of other people in the industry — by the way, who become our board members and trustees and kind of supported the mission. We started bringing international artists to South Africa. We brought first Richard Horton was a technical pioneer. Then we brought Skrillex and Luciano and many others, and like years later we ended up with Ed Sheeran and other many artists coming through our program in our school in South Africa.
At first it was just an idea, like how could we bridge the divide that exists in South Africa between the black communities and the white communities? And how can we connect local talent with international artists and international opportunities? And by doing these first workshops in Langa and also in Soweto, in Johannesburg, we saw a lot of white South Africans entering these communities for the first time. I remember when we announced the first workshop was with Skrillex in Langa, a lot of young kids from the city center were asking why, why we did the workshop there instead of doing it in the city center somewhere else, that is more accessible and comfortable for them. And we said, well, that’s exactly the point: why do we want to use someone like Skrillex to influence the youth from more privileged areas in the city to come into the venture, into the townships and to really mix together with people from a different background, from a different race, and through music and their common passion for that artist, maybe start some collaborations or start building some friendships, even as simple as that, really.
So, we have organized over 50 workshops over the last eight years, with all sorts of international artists, as I said, ranging from techno-DJ to pop stars. And that was kind of the initial idea. We didn’t really think much further than that, to be frankly, honest. But then at some point we started bringing all these artists from the community through a scholarship program to play big festivals in the UK or the Netherlands, like Glastonbury or Tomorrowland, and the whole idea there was like, how can we not only bring international artists to South Africa into their communities, but how can we export that talent from these communities to the world and give them kind of an opportunity to jump on a plane for the first time, get a passport for the first time, playing in front of a complete different audience than what you’re used to in your community, you have that sense of belief and confidence that travel has given to all of us. And so, we started doing that. But that was one of the things that left the artist very inspired, that these young talents they came back to the communities like heroes and super inspired by the trip they had done and like with full of stories and memories, but they’re still facing the same problems and is completely outdated schooling system. A big problem was with crime and other problems that South African townships face, lack of access to facilities, to Internet, to safe spaces, etc, etc. And we thought, I was kind of developing also into that educational coaching side of things at the same time and I thought, what if we create the 21st century school, like a place that is safe, that has all the technology that the kids need to thrive, that is inspiring from an artistic point of view, full of art and where we teach not only music necessarily, but we also teach life skills, meditation, business skills that are equally needed, if not more needed, to thrive and to earn an income, and especially in countries like South Africa.
So, I go into this vision. I work with a very, very famous architect in South Africa. I ask him if he could put a render on how this school could look like in a piece of land that we found in this township in Cape Town. And he gave us an amazing rendering. I ask him to do something out of the box, a bit modern. That is not doesn’t look like a traditional school at all. That is aspirational for the kids that we want a place where the kids need to be inspired to go to every morning. Right. That’s why we believe about education it starts by the space that the students are in. And if you look at all the schools in South Africa and townships, and not even in townships pretty much around the world, they look quite boring and quite rundown in many cases, outdated. In South Africa especially they always have bars on the windows, and they look like prisons, really, as the last place you would like to spend your day. With this visual idea and render from this architect, I kind of went out to our contacts in the industry and asked for partners, that would help us fund the project or at least raise the money. And yeah, we organized different fundraising events. One big cycle event in Europe where we cycled from London to Amsterdam with 30 DJs and people in the music industry, thanks through in partnership with Resident Advisor, which is probably the biggest underground music block in the world. We raised over one hundred and twenty thousand pounds; I think. And with that money, we kind of kick started the whole construction and started building the school. And then, other partners came on board. And it was a constant challenge. And we started building the school from scratch, which came up with another layer of challenges in itself from fighting theft on the construction site to the massive challenges with the construction contractor, with labor, with I mean, you name it right. As cliché as it sounds, construction always cost three times what you initially budgeted for. And that was the case for us as well. Unfortunately, a few years later, we finished the construction and that is the school that you visited. And we opened two years ago right before Covid. We had our first graduation, which was a magical moment after all this long journey. And yeah, here we are just reopened, by the way, after a long stop and break because of Covid. And, yeah, we’re super excited about the program we’re running there now.
As I briefly explained or went into earlier, it’s just much more than music, it’s about human development. We call it a human development center more than a music school. We give equal importance to transferable skills like marketing, marketing skills, business skills, finance, Google, tools like lots of different skills that we believe can really empower our students. And obviously, music is still a magnet. And we do teach music production as well, and we do teach deejaying and other things, that is more of a fun element and a passion element that keeps the students engaged. But we teach many, many more things that really help them thrive.
AS: I mean, I could really feel first this element of community, that is so important for you that you started from that. I think it was so clear. I also found quite interesting this idea of a proper creative journey. And when I say about a creative journey is because often, I think we tend to think about creativity and this is something that, of course, is important for us. The foundation is important for you as a creative, for music. Sometimes there is this misconception that when you think about creativity, people think about something not concrete, think about something like a little bit light to a certain extent, while creativity is about bringing real transformation and creating concrete things. If a creative process doesn’t end up in an object, in something real, it loses completely its meaning. And I think it is so interesting to hear your journey that then ended up in creating something that exists, that is a school, that is an academy, and that all the things that are connected to all the trouble of creating something like that. And I think it is so important to say this is about the creative process: this is something that our president of the Moleskine Foundation talked about in one of the podcasts. He talks about the idea of the meaning of creativity and the researchers say that the origin of creativity, the word creativity comes from the Sanskrit Kar that means to do, to make, it’s very, very concrete. And there are some, to me, very fascinating researchers that basically want to connect the idea of creativity with a specific type of intelligence that the ancient Latin will call it mètis. And it’s a very practical intelligence, that’s the intelligence of Ulysses that figured out a way to move on and get to his vision and get to where he wants to go. And this is to me something very similar. What I found extremely interesting that you started a journey because of your internal needs and that through that internal process, you started solving problems and you start meeting people and you started going more and more in depth. And that continuation of solving a problem at a practical level has been able to create something unique for a larger community. And I found it so interesting because there are no bones in your body that say, oh, I went there because they needed me to do everything, I needed to do the journey for myself and through this introspection.
VS: That’s what they call positive selfishness. Like, I mean, when people talk about the impact space or the charity space, even if you talk about Mother Teresa in Calcutta, like she was doing what she was doing because she wanted to do and it fulfilled her, and I’m not shy about talking about these things. I think it’s human nature, we do all what we do because we think it will make us happy, and thank God, there is people doing better things than other people that are doing wrong things, for making themselves happy, and understand happiness in a more positive way than others that understand in a more negative way. I’d rather have someone that is doing an impact for an amount of people to it for him to even earn money or feel happy or someone doing it by selling hamburgers, that’s kind of contaminating the ocean or whatever else.
So, that’s how we understand profit and meaning and purpose? And I think it’s key like you need to understand that there are different ways of pushing those things. There’s a nice route that will, eventually, affect positively on the people around you and on the world. And there is a route which will probably damage or affect negatively the people around you. What route you’re going to choose I think that’s up to everyone. Hopefully, more and more people will choose the positive route there.
AS: There is this authenticity in your journey that I found very interesting. But I would like to go back for a second from this idea of creating, starting with the idea of creating a school for deejays to now creating like a 21st century school. So, where and I would like, if you can, to tell us a little bit more about the programming, about the curricula and how that came about also, because that was not conceived in the beginning. It is something at some point something clicks and you decided to invest a lot of it.
VS: Yeah. I think like a DJ school necessarily is not perhaps solving so many problems in a community like Langa. I think we can’t sell the broken dream to the kids of becoming the next Black Coffee. Because that is what happens one in a million times. And we need to be very responsible. Like when you come into a community like Langa you need to be extremely responsible with what you sell, I always say, like under promise and over deliver, that’s kind of a motto for us. And because you are working with people that see someone like me, for example, coming from Spain, with all my contacts in the music industry, blah, blah, blah, they might see you with eyes like this, like so much hope and so much expectation, and the moment you start selling things, people buy into them straight away. You have that power. But it is a very important responsibility to be very careful with how you use that power and not misuse your power. We’ve seen these cases in the charity space over and over again, and then you see also all these white elephants, these empty buildings that were built with a lot of hype, with a lot of passion at first, even with a lot of good intention, probably, but then they disappeared or they were run down years later and they were, they ended up being empty buildings that no one is really using. So, I think it’s very, very important to be responsible. From that responsibility we started thinking, so what would be the most efficient approach to education in this community? Considering our background, not shying around from the fact that we have been born in the music industry and that’s our strength and we truly believe in the power of music… Well, what if we use music as the magnets to attract the kids into the school and use all these known faces like Black Coffee and all the many artists have been part of the program to attract them, because the reality is that new generations don’t listen to our politicians, they listen to these guys. Unfortunately, they also listen to the influencers on Instagram and Tik Tok, which is not the good side of it. But artists have a voice and a lot of artists start because they want to bring a message to the world and they have the right place. So, we thought that combination was really attractive to increase the engagement of all the students in the learning space, because that’s also a big problem in South Africa. The massive dropout rate, engagement is very, very bad, and that is because they don’t like the inspiration, they don’t like the role models, they don’t like the mentorship, don’t get inspired by going to school, the teachers are a bit outdated, old school, etc.
So, we have all these big ideas. We’re going to build this fascinating space. Now, what is the most efficient program we can bring? And one of the things that we found — which is kind of obvious — is that a lot of our students come from a very traumatic background. And in order for you to move through life and grow and improve, you need to move past your past trauma. You need to leave that baggage behind. You need to develop a sense of self awareness and really understand what made you who you are, what are your limiting beliefs, how can you break through those limiting beliefs and how can you come out on the other side of being a stronger and better human being? And so, first part of our program, which is pretty much 30 percent of it, is what we call the “Wellbeing and Mindfulness Program”, which is mainly focused on developing that sense of self awareness, we teach meditation with breath work, we do daily journaling, every morning we start with what we call “the great morning routine”, which encompasses all of these things. And in a way, I would say, is the most powerful way for our students to heal from everything they’ve gone through, to open up, to tap into the more vulnerable side, to grow out of their own beliefs or their own fears that, as you can imagine in a society like South Africa, are massive. If you’ve grown in a township, you are in the poverty cycle. Everything that surrounds you, unless you are lucky enough to go out and study in a university with a scholarship or you get to go to a semi-private school or something like that, which is very unlikely. It’s very likely you’re going to end up in the poverty cycle, which means if you are surrounded by things that look rundown, if your neighbor is not a colleague, if your uncle beats his mother, your granny or whatever, whatever you name it, and all this kind of problems, then the likelihood of you ending up in the wrong side of things is very high. So, the first thing you need to do is allow these people, the students, to think out of the box, to see the world out there and to develop a sense of understanding of why they’re thinking, the way they’re thinking and how they could break away from that to develop a new self. And so, all our well-being in mind from this program is focused on that, and, as I said, that’s 30 percent of the problem. And then once you move out of that, that’s all really cool and nice, but now what? How do we how do we earn real tangible skills that can, as you said, it’s very nice and well to start being creative or have an innate talent inside of you. But how do you actually get to materialize into concrete outcomes?
So, all our all our skills we teach in our what we call entrepreneurial programs go from design thinking to finance to marketing to Google tools to accounting to a lot of different things that whether you become an artist or you want to venture into any other thing, there will be very useful for you and will allow you to be more self-sustainable in life. And then the music element: we teach music production, sound engineering and all the things which keep them super motivated. We have 100 percent completion rate that’s never heard of in South Africa. And you have to bear in mind that all our students face challenges like transport, we provide like a daily meal that also helps with engagement, obviously, because that’s a big challenge for them. But there’s so many challenges added to the equation, to make someone complete the program. So, getting a hundred percent completion rate is amazing already. So, yeah, that’s in a nutshell what we’re doing. So, well-being and wellness program to get to a position where you can actually learn and get things in, then all the entrepreneurial part of the program. And then obviously they’re more concrete music focused skills. But now we also venturing to film and design and other creative industries. Then, once they leave the program, once they graduate from the program, which is very important is how do these students access opportunities right in the workspace. And that is what ultimately, we measure to measure our own success. So, we’ve created an incubation program after the study. They have an incubation program where we connect them with opportunities in the creative industries. And this ranges from internships at festivals, recording companies and radio stations and big companies like, you name it like very, very much music industry. And through that they are getting opportunities, some gigs as well. Obviously, they are performing some festivals that we have partnerships with. But through that, they hopefully will start generating a little bit of income from themselves. We believe that the first pay you get in your life for work is a life changing moment. So that is going to be the last part of our equation, to make sense of our impact or impact equation or theory of change, if you want to call it.
AS: It’s quite fascinating also because I was there, and I remember that I had in my class my little conversation with your students. And I remember before and after we had an hour-long meditation, and then we listen to some John Coltrane together. So, I would say, this is not something that happened in the average school I normally go. Remember that moment? The meditation moment is a very powerful moment, it was an exchange that it was quite unique and rare. I would like to ask you about in this process, in all the different experiences that you’ve done, especially being together with your students, what have you learned? Is there something that comes to mind right away that you experience, that you learned in these years that that you started this journey?
VS: Definitely. I learn every day like I’m as inspired as the students are. I always say education is peer to peer, that’s the basis of the future of education, I think. And that’s what really happens in the class, like students learn from each other, but we learn from the students. The students learn from us. And, the one thing that stands out when you first ask the question is the level of resilience that our students have, the level of challenges that they face compared with the challenges that I face or that any student in a more supported society goes through, it’s just incomparable. It’s just amazing. It’s so inspiring to see and I always try to tell them that is your biggest strength and your biggest opportunity, like tap into that level of resilience. Obviously, they are in their own bubble, so they cannot benchmark with what is life out there and how does the life of a privileged kid in a privileged school developed compared with mine. So, it’s difficult to really put value to yourself where you kind of benchmark. But I try to make them aware of that. The level of resilience, the amount of challenges and stuff that they need to go through to just sit in the classroom every morning, that is for me so inspiring and so humbling in so many ways, it really puts things in perspective. And then I think a big learning as well is that like to solve any problem, it is up to the people closest to the problems, so it’s up to people in the community to really spearhead this project and I’ve been blessed and to have met incredible people like Fosta, who you met, I think when you came to with our founding member there, who is a true role model in the community and a true hero of the story. When in many other local inspiring characters that are driven to make a difference in their communities, and we are just connecting the dots if it makes sense, facilitating some resources and, wherever possible, shedding some light. But they are the ones meant to continue this journey and make an impact in their communities. It’s not outsiders, and we want to try and avoid as much as possible the white savior complex. Because you can easily fall into that, too. I don’t know. People listening to the podcast might have heard that concept of white savior concept. But I guess it’s self-explanatory.
AS: Well, yeah. And that’s why I think in the beginning we mentioned it. And also, how you don’t shy away from the idea that this was your journey, your journey by your introspective path, then it brought you to Langa that you start creating and solve your problem. There is a word that we’re very connected to as Moleskine Foundation that you’re probably very familiar with that is the word Ubuntu and what I like the most about that word is that it breaks that assumption of an eye versus the other versus someone, and it expanded the sense of responsibility beyond who you are because you are only within communion. You’re only with someone else. And I think that kind of change the perspective a little bit…
VS: If I may interrupt there, I think it also levels the playing field, like it’s not anymore, a charity interaction. It’s not looking down or looking at. It’s like I am because you are, and it’s exactly what happened, I am because Foster is, Foster is because I am. And because the other one is and it’s like we are all nurturing each other in one way or another. It is an exchange of energy, it’s an exchange of love, passion, whatever you want to call it. But that’s it. That’s the spirit of Ubuntu. I love you mentioned it, and that’s something that I say to a lot of people when they say, “oh, it’s so inspiring what you do” and I am because you are, like you inspire me to some degree. And I am a part of all the people I’ve encountered throughout my life.
I think of you have that approach. And I think it will allow you to create a really meaningful community around you and to live a fulfilling life, I think, and a humble life, which I think is.
AS: The program sounds fantastic. I think you are creating a model that first question that comes to mind when you hear about is that how you can expand, maybe through, by creating more schools, if it makes sense, or maybe also now through leveraging technology. Do you have and do you think that the model that you created with the rest of the team of Bridges for Music can be exported to a certain extent and either physically or through technology? Because that’s I think is one of the biggest conundrums that we have in education, is that there is almost always this dichotomy between a certain level of quality, intentionality, cure and attention, etc. and scale. What are your thoughts around it?
VS: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good question because we are right now in a crossroads. As we’ve talked about this for long hours, we’ve been quite cash strapped for many years. And our main focus is building the first campus and proving what the mission was and showing it to the world and having all the all our ducks in a row in a way, before even thinking of scaling.
And now we have some really inspiring conversation, interesting conversations with some other partners and potential funders to bring this to the next level. And the question is, well, how does the next level look like? is it new schools or is it an online school? Is it B2B programs to train other people and to bring this culture to other schools in education, education institutions? And I think the conclusion we’ve come to is like the uniqueness of bridges is the combination of our international community, architecture, creating spaces that are unique and really inspiring, and the program that I just described. So those three things are what makes the project unique. And I don’t think there’s any other school that has all these big artists involve teaching or mentoring. So that’s definitely unique. There’re not many architecturally beautiful schools around the world that can be inspiring to students and to the community around. And the program, I think, is also unique from the way we combine mindfulness and wellbeing with entrepreneurial, more practical skills.
So, I think that’s how we see now to replicate the model is a massive leap in terms of funding. We have a few conversations now with bigger funders that might be excited to join and help this mission grow. But, yeah, we are a little bit sitting by the fence looking at what’s next. We have another opportunity in Johannesburg and another one in another township in Cape Town that we are exploring, but it’s a massive leap because for us it’s not only about building the school and opening the doors, it’s about maintaining it over time. And that comes with long term commitment from your funders. And it’s a lot of money, like the moment you scale the two schools is double the staff, double the payroll, double everything, double the problems really, and that obviously comes with big responsibility. And unless you have a big company or a big brand backing you up fully, it’s very difficult to take that leap. So, yeah, we’re having conversations with some big stakeholders in the music industry and beyond that might be interested in. And it’s our dream or our aim is that maybe some people at government level are excited to have further conversations. We are exploring different models and how this growth could happen, from the traditional philanthropic model that we are currently in, to even more social impact investment models that we’re exploring to social impact bonds and things that would eventually involve the government also in the equation.
So, exploring all these potential routes, but while you are fighting the fires on your day to day, as you know very well and it’s difficult to get that perspective, to think big picture and get the long-term vision going whilst you are in the trenches.
We are in a better position than the last time we spoke, we have a bigger, bigger team, we have incredible team working at the school and they are keeping it alive and making it grow by themselves. So, for the first time, we’re able to start thinking about that bigger picture vision. But it’s been complicated.
So, now I really believe that if we had to choose one single skill to teach our kids in the future generations, that would be creativity and we can get a little bit philosophical here about creativity understood as that innate talent that we all have as human beings. Unfortunately, over adulthood, it gets shut down and we create our own limiting beliefs around it. But we all have it because I used to say that we all are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. But that innate talent is what I think we need to hone master, to really be able to come up with solutions to the biggest problems we are going to face as humanity, and unfortunately, all the technology that we are creating which is very useful, no doubt about it, for many things, is at the same time the biggest challenge of creativity because we are all becoming, standardized by algorithms, we are always being fed the same thing, whether it’s on Facebook, on social media, we are constantly distracted by all of this noise that we have around us. And that is taking a toll in our creative process. That’s why we also believe on being completely offline at the school, the students have to leave their phone in a box when they get into a school and by the way, we do this by vote at the beginning of the intake. They need to decide about it. But we create the right environment, so they have it easy to decide to leave their phone outside. And we give them some data on how technology is really hindering our creative process and our learning process.
And so, yes, I think creativity is the number one skill that we need to master. And then there’s two other skills that we are very much focused on at the school, which are empathy. So, creativity without empathy could end up being a little meaningless. But we believe that if we if we learn on how to relate to the people around us and to the world we live in, we will be better human beings and be better citizens overall. And we will be able to live a more fulfilling life because we will build a better community around us the moment you empathize with people around you and you can put yourself in other people’s shoes, etc. you develop a way stronger self. The last skill, sorry for taking so much time, is curiosity, because with curiosity, you can be a lifelong learner. You can keep you learning throughout your whole life, and if you master this skills, creativity, curiosity and empathy, I really, really believe there’s nothing I can stop you from evolving as the world evolves, as technology takes over a lot of our jobs, as like our environments change, no doubt they’re going to change. I mean, they’ve changed already over the last two years with Covid. So, you will see that people had struggled with Covid because they didn’t know how to adapt. But there are people that have thrived through it, because they adapted and they saw the opportunity, that comes through all these skills that are really, really important to the master, I think.
AS: Valentino, every time is a pleasure. I always have to feel that I not only learn, I get inspired by what you do, because there is always this sense of doing. There is something that we do in the Moleskine Foundation and our skills that we focus on are critical thinking, lifelong learning, but the central one is creative doing, not thinking. And every time I speak to you, I really see that element that is so strong in your mission and your endeavor.
VS: Dreamers, there are a lot of. Doers, not so many. And the combination of both even less. People that can hold a vision while they get dirty in the day to day and get things done, there’s not so many, and I think that’s the key for anyone out there that is starting a new project right now. It’s excited to change his chapter in his career or whatever it is like, we always say to the students dream big, but be ready to work small.
AS: Listen, man, thank you so much for sharing with us all the stories. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going to come next for Bridges for Music and for you. I would like to invite everyone to go and check out the Bridges for Music website and all the content that is online. And also, I know that you have a podcast
VS: That’s a personal side project that I started to interview people like you and have these types of conversations. It’s called the Resonance Collective and it’s available on all platforms.
AS: Thank you so much for being part of the Creativity Pioneers podcast today.
VS: Thank you very much. Always a pleasure.
This conversation was recorded as one of the Episodes of “Creativity Pioneers”, a podcast by the Moleskine Foundation.
As the Moleskine Foundation’s vision is to inspire a new generation of creative thinkers and doers, this podcast aims to equip all of us with new perspectives and unconventional ideas to amplify our creativity, critical gaze, and imagination.
We engage in conversations with unique creative minds from all over the world, to explore and expand our understanding of creativity and its transformative power.
Each episode sparks from a selection of 3 keywords, chosen by our guest speakers. They serve as a compass, helping to orientate the conversation through art, entrepreneurship, literature, philosophy, politics, and social activism.
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