To write about Milena Aziza Rampoldi, the founder and general manager of ProMosaik, is a challenging task as she is a strong woman loving her intellectual incompleteness and her dynamic fragility. She is a writer affirming that no achievements count but the paths; a journalist affirming that politics is emotional; a teacher affirming that she is nothing else than a facilitator; a researcher confessing that her papers are all open projects asking for genuine feedback; a translator looking for new paradigms in the era of artificial intelligence; and finally a poet saying that we are all poets struggling for an anti-elitist artistic revolution… She is the founder of the initiative ProMosaik which started in Germany in 2014 and works around the globe, by focussing on Africa, the Muslim world, and Latin America.
ProMosaik is an “open project” explained in the book “Manifesto” Milena Aziza wrote and translated in various languages. In this book she introduces 25 principles of her work which at the same time is her intimate passion and her diversified lifestyle. ProMosaik is a project connecting religions and peoples, a project raising its voice against female genital mutilation and slavery in Mauritania, struggling for Muslim feminism and Muslim sociology and affirming that beauty is something political because there is no political change which is not beautiful, and there is no truth without beauty. It is a project teaching languages, and publishing fairy tales for children from all over the world to oppose to racism and discrimination.
The positive word “pro” in the name of the initiative affirms the beauty and at the same time the colourfulness and variety of mosaic colours in different cultures and artistic traditions. Talking about the art of politics is not a contradiction as all political change results in a wonderful, unpredictable aesthetic revolution.
Milena converted to Islam in 2000 and chose her Muslim name Aziza. She believes in Muslim sociology as a force of social change opposed to passive fatalism of any kind, and to immobilism in religious culture and social management. In her books on various subjects, she shows how human rights are not only rights but competences and duties. Milena Aziza believes in the paradigm change from female rights to female competence-focussed duties in socio-political engagements and projects for change in the name of justice, peace, and change dynamics.
Poetry and poetotherapy, sociology and social psychology, ethnopsychiatry and history support authentic social and aesthetical change to promote human rights which are first of all women rights because the women are the ones giving birth to the new generation which is the future of this world that we do not like as it is and we want to change by struggling so hard because there is no other life than the time Allah gave us in this world.
Intercultural dialogue and the urgent necessity of an interlanguage space of truth in linguistic methodology are good starting points to risk without giving up, to do without calculating results we cannot estimate, to dream without forgetting that we are realistic and know that we are incomplete and fragile in comparison to Allah, our Creator, who is beautiful and loves beauty and who wants our own change as individual before He changes a people.
And finally, she believes in “shuracracy”. Every fruitful discussion and every intelligent decision is not my decision but a decision that I will never make without consulting with others as the Queen of Sheba tells Sulaiman in the wonderful political love story in the Quran. Decision-making and communication are arts inspired by Islamic guidance. And there is no achievement, as we are on a dynamic journey of change throughout our life which is made of love, belief, and lots of injustice and frustration we have to transform into beauty and hope because we are women giving birth to a better future.