This article shows how to account for the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity in the arts. By following the genesis of a new theatre production, we examined the sociomaterial practices involved to unpack the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity. To account for this, we draw on concepts from laboratory studies to explain creative and design work. In so doing, we considered the significance of distributed creative practices that are constituted by intermediaries which we argue, help to outline, refine and develop the creative idea. This article is especially attentive to the professional practices in the rehearsal room; what we called the ‘ creative laboratory’, the locus where material artifact and their potentialities unfold in the process of creating a work of art ‘yet to arrive’. Extracts from ethnographic observations are used to illustrate the creative process from the germination of ideas to the collectively arrived at final production. In this respect, the rehearsal room is where initiatives are trialled and tested, and specific aspects of a scene (re)created, to feed into the composition of the emergent theatrical work.

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This article examines “Superbergamo”, a collective which emerged in response to the needs of vulnerable citizens during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bergamo (Italy). The analysis reveals the central role of social media and group chat systems in facilitating the spontaneous creation of the group, and the subsequent development of coordinated voluntary emergency activities that brought aid to thousands of local people. Inspired by Actor-Network theory, the analysis traces of the group's emergence, showing how human and non-human actors—including social media and group chat apps—played a crucial role in shaping the aid practice. In so doing, we contribute to the literature on emergency responses from the public and social media. More significantly, we show how the critical contribution of technology to the development and sustenance of aid practices can be mapped, by providing evidence of how groups, practices and sociomaterial networks are necessarily entangled.

During the pandemic, civil society organisations adjusted their purpose to provide support to the most vulnerable. In the midst of the first wave, Superbergamo, an initiative that grew out of local activist associations, provided groceries and medicine to the elderly, the infirm, and at risk groups during the lockdown in Bergamo, Italy. This research analyses a newspaper article from Corriere della Sera published almost two years after the event, which tells the story of Stefano 'Kino', one of the volunteers of Superbergamo. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we show how the mainstream media normalised the story of Superbergamo to transform a critical, radical, leftist mutual aid practice, into an example of charitable volunteering. By omitting and recontextualising central elements, the article inscribed the mutual aid practice in a catholic narrative, stripping it of any critical afflatus of the status quo. Reframed within the catholic vocabulary by the Corriere della Sera's weekly insert 'good news', the story of Superbergamo becomes one that reinforces the common sensical model of catholic charitable volunteering.