Another successful summer program of academic internships is complete, and as always concluded with an engaging Internship Symposium in which our students got to share amongst themselves and invited guests the wonderful work they completed at their internship placements these last eight weeks. This time their Symposium was also combined with the video screening of the documentary film “Testaccio, a Zero Waste, 15-minute Neighborhood” which they produced for their Sustainable Roman Urbanism and Agriculture course with Professor Tom Rankin.
Please check out the day’s events for yourselves through the linked recording to the Video Screening and Symposium available here.
Kicking off the Symposium presentations, we would be remiss not to express some long overdue gratitude to Ultrablu, a neurodiverse art collective, gallery space, and publishing house that has by now become one of our most frequent internship host partners. The welcome they continually show for our students means more to us and our students than we could possibly express. This summer it was no different as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rising junior Francesca Sadovi and rising senior Francisco Guzman found themselves warmly welcomed into the Ultrablu community where they quickly gained valuable knowledge on the benefits and values of community spaces for neurodiverse populations. To illustrate this, Francesca and Francisco screened the long form video documentary they produced for Ultrablu in order to convey the close knit nature of this community.
Photos: Francesca Sadovi (UIUC class of 2026) with staff and artists at Ultrablu
While we are by now established partners with Ultrablu, we would also like to shed a particular spotlight on a new partnership with Coloriage, a sustainable fashion brand that integrates the high fashion industry with traditional West African design. Lexi Facchini, a rising junior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Business, broke new ground as the first Borromini Institute student to intern at Coloriage. In her day-to-day tasks at her internship, Lexi lent a hand with their intercultural communications and outreach to compatible merchandisers as Coloriage is in the process of establishing a presence in the United States. To build on the experience gained at her internship and to tie in her background in Chemical Engineering, Lexi also conducted a fantastic research paper “Chemical Couture: A Scientific Approach to Combating Waste in the Fashion Industry” on how clothing waste can be upcycled into its own solution that, we believe, ought to be required reading for those in the industry.
Photo: Lexi Facchini (UIUC class of 2026) presenting at the Borromini Institute Internship Symposium
