What does it mean to decolonize? 4 by diego segatto

cover photo: Francesca Gattello, Zeno Franchini

DIFFICULT HERITAGE

WHAT DOES IT MEAN "TO DECOLONIZE" ? 4

Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies 2021 - 2022

photo: Laure Catugier

The Royal Institute of Art (RIA) in Stockholm is a leading art institution of higher education with a long artistic tradition dating back to the beginning of the 18th century. The education offers both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Arts and postgraduate studies in Architecture. RIA also runs an active international program with lectures, exhibitions and publications. www.kkh.se

The Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course is part of a sequence of courses at the Royal Institute of Art that together form a platform for higher education and research on the topic of Decolonizing Architecture. The course uses the term decolonization as a critical position and conceptual frame for an architectural practice engaged in social and political struggles. The courses are led by Alessandro Petti, Professor in Architecture and Social Justice, in collaboration with Marie-Louise Richards, Lecturer in Architecture, and is enriched by the contributions of invited guests. www.daas.academy

introduction

Architectural Demodernization as Critical Pedagogy: Pathways for Undoing Colonial Fascist Architectural Legacies in Sicily – Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti

sites and concepts

The Entity of Colonization, Collective Amnesia – Peter Nylund, Laura Fiorio, Laure Catugier

Spaces of Production, Critical Introspections – Sara Rossling, Sara Davin Omar, Denisse Vega de Santiago

Diasporic Communities’ Crafts(wo)manship, Material Culture as an Inventory of Histories for a Creolizing Space – Francesca Gattello, Zeno Franchini

Borgo Rizza, (g)host Borgo – Laure Catugier

Grandparents’ House, My Fascist Grandpa – Laura Fiorio

Fulfilment Center, Fulfilment Center Innocence – Denisse Vega de Santiago

Franska Tomten (the French Plot), Franska Tomten – Peter Nylund

Genealogy of Swedish Hydropower, Out of Control When I Turn My Power On – Sara Davin Omar

The Nordic Art Association’s Residency, The Nordic Open Call – Sara Rossling

people

Architectural Demodernization as Critical Pedagogy: Pathways for Undoing Colonial Fascist Architectural Legacies in Sicily Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti

The Southern question In 1952 Danilo Dolci, a young architect living and working in industrial Milan, decided to leave behind the North and the ‘dream’ of Italy’s economic boom and rapid modernization, to move to Sicily. As he arrived, he found vast swathes of rural lands that had been brutally scarred by the war, trapped in a systematic spiral of poverty, malnutrition and anomie. After twenty years of fascist authoritarian rule, Italy’s newly created democratic republic preserved fascism’s ‘civilising’ ethos to develop and modernize Sicily. The effect of this was not to bridge any gap with the richer North, but rather to usher in a slow and prolonged repression of the marginalised poor from the South. In the book The Outlaws of Partinico (1956) and many other accounts, Dolci collected the testimonies of people in Partinico and Borgo di Trappeto near Trapani, western Sicily.1 Living on the margins of society, they were rural laborers, unemployed fishermen, convicted criminals, prostitutes, widows and orphans – those who, in the aftermath of fascism, found themselves crushed by state violence and corruption; by the exploitation of local notables and landowners; and by the growing power of the Mafia. Dolci’s activism, which consisted of campaigns and struggles with local communities and popular committees aimed at returning dignity to their villages, often resulted in confrontations with the state apparatus. Modernization, in this context, relied on a carceral approach of criminalization, policing and imprisonment, as a form of domestication of the underprivileged. On the one hand, the South was urged to become like the North, yet on the other, the region was thrown further into social decay, which only accelerated its isolation from the rest of the country. The radical economic and social divide between Italy’s North and South has deep roots in national history and in the colonial/modern paradigm. From 1922, Antonio Gramsci branded this divide as evidence of how fascism exploited the subaltern classes via the Italian northern elites and their capital. Identifying a connection with Italy’s colonization abroad, Gramsci read the exploitation of poverty and migrant labor in the colonial enterprise as one of ‘the wealthy North extracting maximum economic advantage out of the impoverished South’.2 Since the beginning of the colonization of Libya in 1911, Italian nationalist movements had been selling the 8

dream of a settler colonial/modern project that would benefit the underprivileged masses of southern rural laborers. The South of Italy was already considered an internal colony in need of modernization. This set the premise of what Gramsci called Italy’s ‘Southern question’, with the southern subalterns being excluded from the wider class struggle and pushed to migrate towards the colonies and elsewhere.3 By deprovincialising ‘the Southern question’ and connecting it to the colonial question, Gramsci showed that the struggle against racialized and class-based segregation meant thinking beyond colonially imposed geographies and the divide between North and South, cities and countryside, urban laborers and peasants. Gramsci’s gaze from the South can help us to visualise and spatialise the global question of colonial conquest and exploitation, and its legacy of an archipelago of colonies scattered across the North/South divide. Written in the early 1920s but left incomplete, Gramsci’s The Southern Question anticipated the colonizzazione interna (internal colonisation) of fascism, motivated by a capital-driven campaign for reclaiming arable land that mainly effected Italy’s rural South. Through a synthesis of monumentalism, technological development and industrial planning, the fascist regime planned designs for urban and non-urban reclamation, in order to inaugurate a new style of living and celebrate the fascist settler. This programme was launched in continuation of Italy’s settler colonial ventures in Africa. Two paths meet under the roof of the same project – that of modernization.

Architectural colonial modernism Architecture has always played a crucial role in representing the rationality of modernity, with all its hierarchies and fascist ramifications. In the Italian context, this meant a polymorphous and dispersed architecture of occupation – new settlements, redrawn agricultural plots and coerced migration – which was arranged and constructed according to modern zoning principles and a belief in the existence of a tabula rasa. As was the case with architectural modernism on 9

a wider scale, this was implemented through segregation and erasure, under the principle that those deemed as non-modern should be modernized or upgraded to reach higher stages of civilization. The separation in the African colonies of white settler enclaves from Indigenous inhabitants was paralleled with the separation between urban and rural laborers in the Italian South. These were yet another manifestation of the European colonial/modern project, which for centuries has divided the world into different races, classes and nations, constructing its identity in opposition to ‘other’ ways of life, considered ‘traditional’, or worse, ‘backwards’. This relation, as unpacked by decolonial theories and practices, is at the core of the European modernity complex – a construct of differentiations from other cultures, which depends upon colonial hegemony. Taking the decolonial question to the shores of Europe today means recognizing all those segregations that also continue to be perpetuated across the Northern hemisphere, and that are the product of the unfinished modern and modernist project. Foregrounding the impact of the decolonial question in Europe calls for us to read it within the wider question of the ‘de-modern’, beyond colonially imposed geographical divides between North and South. We define ‘demodernization’ as a condition that wants to undo the rationality of zoning and compartmentalization enforced by colonial modern architecture, territorialization and urbanism. Bearing in mind what we have learned from Dolci and Gramsci, we will explain demodernization through architectural heritage; specifically, from the context of Sicily – the internal ‘civilizational’ front of the Italian fascist project.

Sicily’s fascist colonial settlements In 1940, the Italian fascist regime founded the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano (ECLS, Entity for the Colonization of the Sicilian Latifondo), following the model of the Ente di Colonizzazione della Libia and of colonial urban planning in Eritrea and Ethiopia.4 The entity was created to reform the latifondo, the predominant agricultural system in southern Italy for centuries. This consisted of large estates and agricultural plots owned by noble, mostly absentee, landlords. Living far from their holdings, these landowners used local middlemen and hired thugs to sublet to local peasants and farmers who needed plots of land for selfsustenance.5 Fascism sought to transform this unproductive, outdated and exploitative system, forcing a wave of modernization. Between 1940–43, the Ente built more than 2,000 homesteads and completed eight settlements in Sicily. These replicated the structures and planimetries that were built throughout the 1930s in the earlier bonifica integrale (land reclamation) of the Pontine Marshes near Rome, in Libya and in the Horn of Africa; the same mix of piazzas, schools, churches, villas, leisure centers, monuments, and a Casa del Fascio (fascist party headquarters). In the name of imperial geographical unity, from the ‘center’ to the ‘periphery’, many of the villages built in Sicily were called after fascist ‘martyrs’, soldiers and settlers who had died in the overseas colonies. For example, Borgo Bonsignore was named after a carabinieri (military officer) who died in the Battle of Gunu Gadu in 1936, and Borgo Fazio and Borgo Giuliano after Italian settlers 10

killed by freedom fighters in occupied Ethiopia. The reform of the latifondo also sought to implement a larger strategy of oppression of political dissent in Italy. The construction of homesteads in the Sicilian countryside and the development of the land was accompanied by the state-driven migration of northern laborers, which also served the fascist regime as a form of social surveillance. The fascists wanted to displace and transform thousands of rural laborers from the North – who could otherwise potentially form a stronghold of dissent against the regime – into compliant settlers.6 Simultaneously, and to complete the colonising circle, many southern agricultural workers were sent to coastal Libya and the Horn of Africa to themselves become new settlers, at the expense of Indigenous populations. All the Sicilian settlements were designed following rationalist principles to express the same political and social imperatives. Closed communities like the Pontine settlements were ‘geometrically closed in the urban layout and administratively closed to farmers, workmen, and outside visitors as well’.7 With the vision of turning waged agrarian laborers into small landowners, these borghi were typologically designed as similar to medieval city enclaves, which excluded those from the lower orders. These patterns of spatial separation and social exclusion were, unsurprisingly, followed by the racialization of the Italian southerners. Referring to a bestiary, the propaganda journal Civiltà Fascista (Fascist Civilization) described the Pontine Marshes as similar to ‘certain zones of Africa and America’, ‘a totally wild region’ whose inhabitants were ‘desperate creatures living as wild animals’.8 Mussolini’s regime explicitly presented this model of modernization, cultivation and drainage to the Italian public as a form of warfare. The promise of arable land and reclaimed marshes shaped an epic narrative which depicted swamps and the ‘unutilized’ countryside as the battlefield where bare nature – and its ‘backward inhabitants’ – was the enemy to be tamed and transformed. However, despite the fanfare of the regime, both the projects of settler colonialism in Africa and the plans for social engineering and modernization in the South of Italy were short-lived. As the war ended, Italy ‘lost’ its colonies and the many Ente were gradually reformed or shut down.9 While most of the New Towns in the Pontine region developed into urban centres, meanwhile most of the fascist villages built in rural Sicily were abandoned to a slow decay. Although that populationist model of modernisation failed, the Sicilian countryside stayed at the center of the Italian demographic question for decades to come. Since the 1960s, these territories have experienced a completely different kind of migration to that envisaged by the fascist regime. Local youth have fled unemployment in huge numbers, migrating to northern Italy and abroad. With the end of WWII and the crumble of the Empires it was thus the era of reversed postcolonial migration: no longer white European settlers moving southward/ eastward, but rather a circulatory movement of people flowing in other directions, 11

with those now freed from colonial oppression taking up the possibility to move globally. Since then, a large part of Sicily’s agrarian sector has relied heavily on seasonal migrant labor from the Southern Hemisphere and, more recently, from Eastern Europe. Too often trapped in the exploitative and racist system of the Italian labor market, most migrants working in areas of intensive agriculture – in various Sicilian provinces near the towns of Cassibile, Vittoria, Campobello di Mazara, Caltanissetta and Paternò – have been forced out of cities and public life. They live isolated from the local population, socially segregated in tent cities or rural slums, and without basic services such as access to water and sanitation. As such, rural Sicily – as well as vast swathes of southern Italy – remain stigmatized as ‘insalubrious’ spaces, conceived of in the public imagination as ‘other’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘backward’. From the time of the fascist new settlements to the informal rural slums populated by migrants in the present, much of the Sicilian countryside epitomizes a very modern trope: that the South is considered to be in dire need of modernization. The rural world is seen to constitute an empty space as the urban centers are unable to deal with the social, economic, political and racial conflicts and inequalities that have been (and continue to be) produced through the North/South divides. This was the case at the time of fascist statedriven internal migration and overseas settler colonial projects. And it still holds true for the treatment of migrants from the ex-colonies, and their attempted resettlement on Italian land today. Since 2007, Sicily’s right-wing regional and municipal governments have tried repeatedly to attain public funding for the restoration of the fascist settlements. While this program has been promoted as a nostalgic celebration of the fascist past, in the last decade, some municipalities have also secured EU funding for architectural restoration under the guise of creating ‘hubs’ for unhoused and stranded migrants and refugees. None of these projects have ever materialized, although EU money has financed the restoration of what now look like clean, empty buildings. These plans for renovation and rehousing echo Italy’s deepest populationist anxieties, which are concerned with managing and resettling ‘other’ people considered ‘in excess’. While the ECLS was originally designed to implement agrarian reforms and enable a flow of migration from the north of the country, this time, the Sicilian villages were seen as instrumental to govern – via forced settlement and (an illusion of) hospitality – unwanted migrants. This reinforces a typical modern hierarchical relationship between North and South, and with that, exploitative metropolitan presumptions over the rural world.

The ENTITY of DECOLONIZATION: 2020 Quadriennale d’arte To imagine a counter-narrative about Sicily’s – and Italy’s – fascist heritage, we presented a Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR) project, in the form of an installation for the 2020 Quadriennale d’arte – FUORI. This was held at the

Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the venue of the Prima mostra internazionale d’arte coloniale (First International Exhibition of Colonial Art, 1931), as well as other propaganda exhibitions curated by the fascist regime. The installation aims to critically rethink the rural towns built by the ECLS. It marks the beginning of a longer-term collaborative project, the Ente di Decolonizzazione or ENTITY of DECOLONIZATION, which is conceived as a transformative process in historytelling. The installation builds on a photographic dossier of documentation produced by Luca Capuano, which reactivates a network of built heritage that is at risk of decay, abandonment and being forgotten. With the will to find new perspectives from which to consider and deconstruct the legacies of colonialism and fascism, the installation thinks beyond the perimeters of the fascist-built settlements, to the different forms of segregations and division they represent. It moves from these contested spaces towards a process of reconstitution of the social, cultural and intimate fabrics that have been broken by modern splits and bifurcations. The project is about letting certain stories and subjectivities be reborn and reaffirmed, in line with Walter D. Mignolo’s statement that: ‘re-existing means using the imaginary of modernity rather than being used by it. Being used by modernity means that coloniality operates upon you, controls you, forms your emotions, your subjectivity, your desires. Delinking entails a shift towards using instead of being used.’10 The ENTITY of DECOLONIZATION is a fluid and permanent process, that seeks for perpetual manifestations in architectural heritage-making, art practice and critical pedagogy, and it is activated to question and contest the modernist structures under which we live.

The ENTITY of DECOLONIZATION: Difficult Heritage Summer School In Borgo Rizza, one of the eight villages built by the Ente, we launched the Difficult Heritage Summer School11 – a space for critical pedagogy and discussions around practices of reappropriation and re-narrativization of the spaces and symbols of colonialism and fascism. Given that the villages were built to symbolize fascist ideology, how far is it possible to subvert their founding principles? How to reuse these villages, built to celebrate fascist martyrs and settlers in the colonial wars in Africa? How to transform them into antidotes to fascism? Borgo Rizza was built in 1940 by the architect Pietro Gramignani on a piece of land previously expropriated by the ECLS from the Caficis, a local family of landowners. It exhibits a mixed architectural style of rationalism and neoclassical monumentalism. The settlement is formed out of a perimeter of buildings around a central protected and secured piazza that was also the main access to the village. The main edifices representing temporal power (the fascist party, the ECLS, the military and the school) and spiritual power (the church) surround the center of the piazza. To display the undisputed authority of the regime, the Casa

photo: Sara Pellegrini

del Fascio took center stage. The village is surrounded on all sides by eucalyptus trees planted by the ECLS and the settlers. The planting of eucalyptus, often to the detriment of indigenous trees, was a hallmark of settler colonialism in Libya and the Horn of Africa, dubiously justified because their extensive roots dry out swamps and so were said to reduce the risk of malaria. With the end of the Second World War, Borgo Rizza, along with all the other Sicilian settlements, went through rapid decay and decline. It first became a military outpost, before being temporarily abandoned in the war’s aftermath. In 1975, the ownership and management of the cluster of buildings comprising the village was officially transferred to the municipality of Carlentini, which has since made several attempts to revive it. In 2006, the edifices of the Ente di Colonizzazione and the post office were rehabilitated with the intent of creating a garden centre amid the lush vegetation. However, the centre was never realized, while the buildings and the rest of the settlement remain empty. Yet, despite the village’s depopulation, over the years the wider community of Carlentini has found an informal way to reuse the settlement’s spaces. The void of the piazza, left empty since the fall of fascism, became a natural spot for socialising. The piazza was originally designed by the ECLS for party gatherings and to convey order and hierarchy to the local population. But many locals remember a time, in 14

the early 1980s, before the advent of air-conditioned malls offering new leisure spaces to those living in peri-urban and rural areas, when people would gather in the piazza for fresh air amid summer heatwaves. The summer school builds on these memories, to return the piazza to its full public function and reinvent it as a place for both hospitality and critical pedagogy. Let’s not forget that the village was first used as a pedagogical tool in the hands of the regime. The school building was built by the ECLS and was the key institution to reflect the principles of neo-idealism promoted by the fascist and neo-Hegelian philosophers Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Lombardo Radice. Radice was a pedagogue and theoretician who contributed significantly to the fascist reforms of the Italian school system in the 1930s. Under the influence of Gentile, his pedagogy celebrated the modern principle of a transcendental knowledge that is never individual but rather embodied by society, its culture, the party, the state and the nation. In the fascist ideal, the classroom was designed to be a space where students would strive to transcend themselves through acquired knowledge. A fascist education was meant to make pupils merge with the ‘universal’ embodied by the teacher, de facto the carrier of fascist national values. In relation to the countryside context, the role of pedagogy was to glorify the value of rurality as opposed to the decadence wrought by liberal bourgeois cultures and urban lifestyles. The social order of fascism revolved around this opposition, grounded in the alienation of the subaltern from social and political life, via the splitting of the urban and rural working class, the celebration of masculinity and patriarchy, and the traditionalist nuclear family of settlers. Against this historical background, our summer school wants to inspire a spatial, architectural and political divorce from this past. We want to engage with decolonial pedagogies and encourage others to do the same, towards an epistemic reorganization of the building’s architecture. In this, we share the assertion of Danilo Dolci, given in relation to the example of elementary schools built in the fascist era, of the necessity for a liberation from the physical and mental cages erected by fascism: These seemed designed (and to a large extent their principles and legacies are still felt today) to let young individuals get lost from an early age. So that they would lose the sense of their own existence, by feeling the heavy weight of the institution that dominates them. These buildings were specifically made to prevent children from looking out, to make them feel like grains of sand, dispersed in these grey, empty, boundless spaces.12 This is the mode of demodernization we seek in this project: to come to terms with, confront, and deactivate the tools and symbols of modern fascist colonization and authoritarian ideologies, pedagogy and urbanism. It is an attempt to fix the social fabric that fascism broke; to heal the histories of spatial, social and political isolation in which the village originates. Further, it is an attempt to heal pedagogy itself, from within a space first created as the pedagogical hammer in the hands of the regime’s propagandists. 15

This means that when we look at the shapes of this rationalist architecture, we do not feel any aesthetic pleasure in or satisfaction with the original version. This suggests the need to imagine forms of public preservation outside of the idea of saving the village via restoration, which would limit the intervention to returning the buildings to their ‘authentic’ rationalist design. Instead, the school wants to introduce the public to alternative modes of heritage making.

photo: Sara Pellegrini

Architectural Demodernization In the epoch in which we write and speak from the southern shores of Europe, the entanglement of demodernization with decolonization is not a given, and certainly does not imply an equation. While decolonization originates in – and is only genealogically possible as the outcome of – anti-colonialist struggles and liberation movements from imperial theft and yoke, demodernization does not relate to anti-modernism, which was an expression of reactionary, antitechnological and nationalist sentiment, stirred at the verge of Europe’s liberal collapse in the interwar period. As Dolci explained for the Italian and Sicilian context, there is no shelter to be found in any anachronistic escape to the (unreal and fictional) splendours of the past. Nor, as Gramsci has asserted, will the Italian South find the solutions to its problems through meridionalism, a form of southern 16

identitarian and essentialist regionalism, which further detaches ‘the Southern question’ from possible alliances with the North. Demodernization does not mean eschewing electricity and wiring, mortar and beams, or technology and infrastructure, nor the consequent welfare that they provide, channel and distribute. By opposing modernity’s aggressive universalism, demodernization is a means of opening up societal, collective and communal advancement, change and transformation. Precisely as Dolci explains, the question it is not about the negation of progress, but about choosing which progress you want.13 In the context in which we exist and work, imagining the possibility of an architectural demodernization is an attempt to redraw the contours of colonial architectural heritage, and specifically, to raise questions of access, ownership and critical reuse. We want to think of demodernization as a method of epistemic desegregation, which applies to both discourse and praxis; to reorient and liberate historical narratives of fascist architectural heritage from the inherited whiteness and ideas of civilization instilled by colonial modernity; and to invent forms of architectural reappropriation and reuse. We hold one final aim in mind: that the remaking of (post)colonial geographies of knowledge and relations means turning such fascist designs against themselves.

photo: Jens Haendeler 17

1. Danilo Dolci, Banditi a Partinico [1956], Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 2009. 2. Neelam Srivastava, Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, p. 2. 3. Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question, Ontario: Guernica Editions, 2015. 4. The Ente di Colonizzazione is often translated into English as ‘agency’ or ‘body’. Instead, we suggest ‘entity’ as an alternative option. The Latin origin of ‘entity’ or entità from Christian medieval philosophy echoes a spiritual dimension, namely a formal, absolute and immanent presence that absorbs, contains and supercedes the individual sphere. Later secularized into a juridical body, the ente indicates ‘institutions’ or ‘legal bodies’ that vouch for supra-individual interests. In our translation, ‘entity’ is a presence in itself, that can manifest equally as supernatural/immanent and bodily/material. 5. Joshua Samuels, ‘Difficult Heritage: Coming “to Terms” with Sicily’s Fascist Past’, in Heritage Keywords, Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage (ed. K. Lafrenz Samuels and T. Rico), Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. 6. Maria Rosa Protasi and Eugenio Sonnino, ‘Politiche di popolamento: colonizzazione interna e colonizzazione demografica nell’Italia liberale e fascista’, Popolazione e Storia, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003, pp. 91–138. 7. Diane Y. Ghirardo, ‘Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 39, no. 2, 1980, p. 124. 8. Mario M. Morandi, ‘L’introduzione all’Agro Pontino’, Civiltà Fascista, vol. II, 1935, pp. 1009–10. Translation by the authors. 9. The Ente in Libya was only formally abolished in 1961, ten years after Libya’s independence, while the ECLS was reformed in 1950 and renamed the Ente per la Riforma Agraria in Sicilia (Body for Sicilian Agrarian Reform). This was followed by the creation of a new institution, the Ente di Sviluppo Agricolo (Body for Agricultural Development, ESA) in 1965. 10. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 147. 11. The Summer School is a collaborative project between DAAS-Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, the Critical Urbanisms MA program at the University of Basel, the municipality and the local community of Carlentini, in Sicily. 12. Giuseppe Casarrubea, ‘Danilo Dolci: sul filo della memoria’, Pratica della Libertà, no. 7, July–September 1998, p. 16. Translation by the authors. 13. Giuseppe Barone, La forza della nonviolenza. Bibliografia e profilo biografico di Danilo Dolci, Napoli: Dante & Descartes, 2004. 18

photo: Sara Pellegrini

photo: Jens Haendeler

YEAR V 2021-2022

Difficult Heritage

The topic of this year aims to reflect and intervene in the debate regarding the architectural heritage associated with painful and violent memories. The course will focus on the rural towns built in the 1940s by the “Entity of Colonization of Sicily” during the fascist regime. These rural towns were built by the regime to “reclaim,” “modernize,” and “repopulate” the south of Italy considered “empty,” “underdeveloped,” and “backward”. The analysis of these towns will offer course participants the opportunity to problematize the persistence of today’s colonial relationship with the countryside, especially after the renewed interest in the countryside as a solution for the pandemic. Parallel to the collective research, every student is asked to research an individual case study of difficult heritage. The intersection between individual and collective research is shared with a larger public at the end of the year in a discursive exhibition. The course is organized in collaboration with the Critical Urbanism course at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and will take place in Stockholm, online, and in the former building of the “Entity of Colonization of Sicilian Latifundia” in Borgo Rizza, Municipality of Carlentini in Sicily.

photo: Alessandro Petti

The Entity of Colonization borgo rizza, carlentini, sicily

Collective Amnesia The Amnesia Collective for Reflection on the Memory of a Difficult Heritage Peter Nylund, Laura Fiorio, Laure Catugier

For this series of hosted sessions in spring 2022, we strive to work with memory, or do memory work, in the context of Borgo Rizza. We hope to begin building a digital archive of collective memories from the DAAS group, the students from Critical Urbanisms, and from the local Carlentini/Lentini participants in Sicily. In doing so, we want to better understand how the collective memory of this place is diminishing, how the past is ‘playing out’ in the present, and how to draw connections between the current global rise of fascism and its obsession with old symbols and places. We do this in order to continue asking ourselves ethical questions in regard to doing work in places of difficult heritage, and to form a basis from where to begin crafting interventions. This will help us in thinking of possible reappropriation(s) of Borgo Rizza that can act as a kind of template for how to engage with other places of difficult heritage whose memory is fading and falling into collective amnesia. For us, a large part of the work is connection and networking with other realities and collectives who are organizing internationally. Thus, we aim to invite persons or groups working on similar topics to exchange experiences in a collective learning process. The aim is to reflect on memory and community, especially in a place such as Borgo Rizza, which is located outside the city and not (yet) often occupied or used in regular and/or public activities. With our engagement we would like to reflect on the importance of community in the preservation of memory, and exercise strategies of both remembrance and community making, in parallel relationship and critical approach to, and dialogue with, the Summer School program in late summer 2022.

{ Amnesia Collective }

As the Amnesia Collective, we are aiming to balance between theory and practice. First, we will invite guest speakers to situate the current situation of rising fascism and possible ways of resisting it politically and artistically, and put them in dialogue with the community in Carlentini. Secondly, we will host a workshop where we collectively gather our own memories from Borgo Rizza, and begin the work of compiling the photos, videos, and texts into a website/online archive where the memories can be visualized and used as a starting point to organize and plan possible activities for the summer, with the participation of both scholars and locals. Thirdly, we will invite two speakers to have a discussion about their work with memory and preservation thereof, in their experience and in the context of the Chilean fascist dictatorship. We will try to find out what strategies they are applying, how they see their situation in work with the community, and how they relate to memory. The dialogue and exchange aim to enrich both communities and create an interesting dialogue between the two. Finally, we will host a collage workshop to collectively imagine the reuse of Borgo Rizza (led by Laure) in summer 2022.

– Peter Nylund, Laura Fiorio, Laure Catugier

Spaces of Production sweden and the netherlands

Critical Introspections Sara Rossling, Sara Davin Omar, Denisse Vega de Santiago

On a cold evening in October, a Swedish curator (Sara Rossling), a SwedishKurdish architect (Sara Davin Omar) and a Mexican architect and art historian based in the Netherlands (Denisse Vega de Santiago) met in Stockholm over some drinks. We met at Kungsträdgården, one of Stockholm’s best known parks, where Swedish artist and activist Simon Ferner also joined us. On the way to the bar, we passed by the statue of King Charles XII standing firmly, pointing towards the east. Simon, who has been researching Swedish Nazism for sometime now, told us about the history of the place. Every year on the 30th of November, Neo-Nazis commemorate the legacy of the 17th century Swedish Empire around the statue, countered by anti-racist activists. The demonstration was brought back to light by right-wing university students in the 1990s, who later on became right-wing politicians in the Swedish parliament. In response to this information, Sara Davin Omar expressed her interest in public space as an agonistic arena where people also counter the flux of racist trends. Someone else then added: “Wouldn’t it be nice if our spatial projects could do the same? Protest out loud, actively and affectively against racism?” We continued our walk towards a half-decent Mexican bar nearby the park, discussing current growing neo-Nazi and neo-fascist trends across the Netherlands and Sweden. We also talked about how our current spatial projects strive for anti-racism and decolonization. Our collective project, Critical Introspections, seeks to continue that conversation – and sees conversation not only as a philosophical matter but also as something that has implications for our practices. Our individual projects all emerge from sites of production: Sara Davin Omar’s Genealogy of Swedish Hydropower, Sara Rossling’s The Nordic Open Call, and Denisse Vega de Santiago’s Fulfilment Center Innocence. By creating dialogue between these three projects, Critical Introspections seeks to show how these spaces of production of art, knowledge, labor, and energy navigate tensions of their own complicity with legacies of colonialism, imperialism and extractivism, and their desire to escape these logics. To engage in critical introspection urges positionality and openness to alter and unlearn previous ways of working. Thus, our collective project investigates our various methods and positions whilst seeking ways for these projects to become mechanisms of activation for decolonization and anti-racism. 31

{ Critical Introspection }

introfrom Latin intro (adv.) “in, on the inside, within, to the inside,” *spekProto-Indo-European root meaning “to observe.” In Towards a Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed refers to Maurice MerleauPonty’s writings about the body as “our point of view in the world” rather than “an object in the world”.1 Applying this within an artistic practice does not equal studying the self or returning within to seek comfort, but rather means to acknowledge and highlight that the orientation of our beings in space is an inescapable constant in every human activity, which also can include embodied complicities that need to be taken into consideration. By redirecting our gaze one step closer to ourselves and our practice in an act of critical introspection, we reflect upon our own roles as space practitioners, asking: What might it mean to (re-)produce spaces of anti-racism and decoloniality, starting from within? Adding ‘critical’ to ‘introspection’ as a conceptual lens for our project illuminates the educational context from which this collaborative work has emerged. The combination of terms links us as subjects, connects our inside/within. It also has class connotations, highlighting our awareness of the privileged academic way of critical thinking we have as people who have the time and resources to reflect upon themselves. Aware of such a perspective, we have been employing the critical as external feedback amongst our group, to challenge the blind spots of our introspection.

– Sara Rossling, Sara Davin Omar, Denisse Vega de Santiago

1. Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press, p.53. 32

Diasporic Communities’ Crafts(wo)manship palermo

Material Culture as an Inventory of Histories for a Creolizing Space Francesca Gattello, Zeno Franchini

With colonization, the principle that governs the body politic became that of differentiality: the management of disparities between citizens and other groups, and among citizens themselves. One of the tools of differentiality has been the constant denial of one’s culture, especially in the form of material culture. As Azoulay writes: “From the beginning, art has been imperialism’s preferred terrain. Much has been written about the impoverishment of different cultures whose artistic treasures were expropriated to enrich Western aristocracies and embellish Western museums. Less has been written about the reduction of art from a polysemous set of practices endemic to the rituals, habits, and needs of various communities to a unified activity whose products are exchangeable objects, destined to be interpreted and cared for by experts according to allegedly neutral procedures that have been made into the transcendental condition of art. Even less has been written about the danger of depriving people of their material worlds.”1 Colonized people have been deprived of a secure place among objects and people that one recognizes and where one is recognized as more than a piece of property, a unit of labor-power, or a source of tax revenue. When we think of the current criminalization of migration, we should also see it as the movement of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homes for the countries of their ex-colonizers in Europe, to join part of the wealth and culture that was denied to (and stolen from) them. Similarly, Sicilian material culture has been set aside in favor of industrial development and progress that never succeeded. As with other so-called ‘underdeveloped’ territories that were exploited to grant the wealthier part of the world an unsustainable lifestyle, Sicilians were denied their cultural identity, becoming a periphery of Italy and Europe. Today Sicily finds itself no longer at the center of the Mediterranean, but on the border of fortress Europe, part of the Western societies but still reminiscent of other world orders and exchanges. As refugees land on its coasts, a cowardly political balance keeps them segregated

and denies their right to citizenship, ‘warehousing’ them as both potentially dangerous and passive subjects in need of help, deprived of their past and their culture, considered unworthy to be ‘integrated’. Both migrants and Sicilians have been deprived of their material heritage in different ways, but the ruination of material infrastructures is a common trait that emerges in striking evidence when looking at traditional and vernacular manufacture and crafts. In working with newcomers, we take advantage of the density of the urban dimension and the collection of narratives around its making, to position Design and crafts in a ‘vernacular’ trajectory – a process of centuries that has always been based on encounter of the other, and relation to one’s surroundings. As the city of Palermo was stratified with successive colonizations and influxes, today we question what this layering and juxtaposition produces. While the management and reproduction of material culture are deeply elitist and unequal, together with newcomers we carve out workspaces in which we can deepen the research in and around these questions, in an attempt to establish an exchange and co-design process.

1. AZOULAY Ariella, ‘Plunder, The Transcendental Condition Of Modern Art And Community Of Fabri’, curated by ROELANDT Els and BAROIS DE CAEVEL Eva in Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2017. 36

{ Collective Production of Design Objects as a Creolizing Practice }

The design process lends itself well to experimenting with alternative production processes, particularly given its artisanal dimension; its more horizontal structure compared with architecture; the post-modern turn of ‘entreprecariat’; and the niche market of the discipline.1 In a marginalized context, we question the meaning of the design process through participatory practices, exploring how civic and collective means of production could be taken as an experimental model for acknowledging cultural heritage as a common good. After all, many vernacular techniques that are part of material culture are nothing but strategies and ways to relate to environments that often share common traits in Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean. On the other hand, design is also a deeply colonial discipline: at its roots, it represents the arbitrary erasure of crafts in favor of industrial production, guided by modernist principles of defining what was worth being kept from the ‘primitive’ handcrafts, and what needed to be forgotten in favor of more profitable manufacture, often based on extractive economies. However, contemporary design is so ‘democratized’ and precarious that today it is almost a synonym for self-production – autoproduzione. In antithesis to its very origins, designers are pushed to take the risks of production and research without really benefiting from its results. Due to these oppressive forces, they turn instead to engaging in causes that are much closer to their positionality, rather than what the industry demands. In an unexpected turn, this condition can allow communities to take part in the process of making their environment, moving away from purely symbolic art to address both material and intellectual struggles, while shaping the possibility of collective production.

As designers, we find ourselves excluded by the same unsustainable globalized system of production that we help to construct and that determines erasure of local identity. Yet, in contexts such as Palermo, we were able to find highquality hand-making craftsmen who are on the edge of closure but still willing to collaborate in a new dynamic of production. We are experiencing a distributed ‘studio’ in which, by taking advantage of a common informality, it is possible to open access to marginalized communities. In an attempt to bring back a ‘polysemous set of practices endemic to the rituals, habits, and needs of a community’, we hope to facilitate a space no longer on the periphery of the ‘empire’ but at the center of a creolizing micro universe.2

– Francesca Gattello, Zeno Franchini

1. Entreprecariat is a portmanteau that combines entrepreneurialism and the precariat. On a basic level, the entreprecariat refers to the reciprocal influence of an entrepreneurialist regime and pervasive precarity. LO RUSSO Silvio, Entreprecariat, Eindhoven, Onomatopee, 2019. 2. The term describes new cultural expressions brought about by contact between societies and relocated peoples; Sociologist Robin Cohen writes that creolization occurs when “participants select particular elements from incoming or inherited cultures, endow these with meanings different from those they possessed in the original cultures, and then creatively merge these to create new varieties that supercede the prior forms.” COHEN Robin, Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The Soft Sounds of Fugitive Power, Globalizations, 2007. 39

Borgo Rizza sicily

(g)host Borgo Laure Catugier

Created ex-nihilo by Mussolini, the Borgo is a small urban area in the heart of the Sicilian agricultural countryside, grouping together well-defined units and intended to unify a precarious economic system. Scattered throughout the island, it is similar to a square around which basic services are distributed in a hierarchical way: the Casa del Fascio, the school, the post office, the fire station, and often in the background, the church. The Borgo Rizza fascinates me in two ways: it is both attractive (recent renovation, attractive geometrical shapes, acidulous candy colors) and repulsive (Das Unheimliche -Freud’s disturbing strangeness- generated by the emptiness of the place). In fact, today it looks like the set of a ghost film, the filming of which never took place. Borgo = (g)host. Located in the countryside and very isolated, Borgo Rizza leaves me wondering, where exactly is this? Who owns it? What is its purpose? The ‘strangeness’ continues in the absence of street names or signs indicating what it is, and the difficulty of identifying it on Google Maps. This physical heritage seems to be accompanied by an intangible heritage. Because of its very orderly structure, it leaves no room for chance, for luck, for randomness. It would seem that access to the site is deliberately difficult (isolated location, lack of transport linking it to the city), as well as its visibility (absence of signs). The square is turned in on itself. Moreover, as its real function is not utilitarian but rather symbolic and political, it imposes a certain toxic virility; a weight through heavy materials; a solid visual composition and clearly separated functions. A military order that seems to exclude a place for the human body, rendered useless. Only the pastel color palette contradicts this impression; it softens the angles. In my eyes, it has a camouflage function, leading to surprising scenes: it attracts future brides and grooms in search of romantic images to immortalize. The Borgo exudes a certain representation of power that has been frozen in time through the makeovers it has received. For me, this ambitious project of renovating most of the Borghi of Sicily by their region or the E.U. is absurd, an action that seems doomed to fail because it freezes a model of standardization that did not

work 80 years ago (and certainly won’t now). Inside the buildings, there is no indication of what they will house, what function is assigned to them. They are empty shells, renovated in a contemporary and neutral way: hygienic white walls, sealed rooms separated by walls and doors. It is façade architecture, whose only function is to exist, to occupy a space. Why is there such a need for conservation, and how can it be better understood? How to de-enslave a place associated with fascism, where the violence was psychological rather than physical, leaving no visible trace? A place which, moreover, bears the name of a former Italian colonizer considered a hero? How to measure the impact and damage suffered by the local community, in order to consider better future use values from a social point of view? How to overcome the current fetishization of the site generated by its recent revaluation?

{ upcoming or postponed? }

#UnscrewYourMonument Like some of the colonial statues that have recently been removed in different cities around the world, why not try to debunk the architecture? Can we imagine an architecture that has broken all ties with location? Could we consider that architecture, in the same way as a human being, could undergo or exert a psychological pressure, which would necessitate its displacement or even its removal? Would the action of moving a building from one place to another allow the desacralization of architecture? If so, how do we de-spatialize, de-architect, de-territorialize this anchored construction? #architectureVSfunction #RuinPorn As an artist, my goal is to divert an architectural structure from its path so that it becomes a place of greater diversity, which opens rather than closes possibilities. Inspired by architect Oskar Hansen’s theory of ‘open form’, architecture should be participatory, with non-hierarchical processes, and should not be fixed once construction is complete. Hansen defines the closed form as ‘monument’. At this point, the architecture is only an empty shell, possibly transmuting into a sculptural object in the urban space, and possibly fetishized. I call this facadism, a need to keep part of the skeleton, in order to give the illusion of its presence and to assert its symbolic value. #HijackTheNarrative After a long period of stand-by since the fall of the fascist regime, the Borgo Rizza needs new narratives. After discussions with local actors (residents, artists, municipal agents), different types of activities such as local food celebrations, cultural festivals, sports events, meetings and competitions of all kinds have been suggested. Inspired by these ideas, I propose to create a promotional campaign announcing fictitious events, deployed as posters in the streets of nearby towns. Undated, they will announce events on site as upcoming or postponed, leaving a doubt as to their feasibility, and echoing at the same time the instability generated by the current pandemic. The various urban legends that may emerge from this action have the purpose of making the Borgo Rizza exist in the imagination, even though it is not yet really in operation.

– Laure Catugier

Grandparents’ House san bonifacio

My Fascist Grandpa The Collected and the Collective Laura Fiorio

My grandparents’ now semi-abandoned house, where my mother and her two sisters grew up, is a place that in its own little way contains many narratives that have to do with a violent past. This is a difficult heritage shared by many people— particularly women—not only of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but also in the present day. Finding oneself in a house full of objects, having to discuss who can or should do what and who is or is not entitled to something else, is a simple everyday metaphor. It is an episode of common and shared experience that can make us reflect—whether we want to or not—on how difficult and painful a legacy is to manage, not necessarily because of mourning but because of the dynamics that are triggered. When the family tree splits, branches multiply from one root and the private becomes collective. There are so many variables that pop up to make problematic a simple pile of objects, or a house falling apart. I am thinking of memories, both private and collective, which are identified and materialized in objects and in so doing take on a certain value. In old family albums, as in monuments that inhabit public spaces, we see a past with which we may or may not identify, but which is sewn onto us by our ancestors, in institutions or in families. My grandfather was a fascist. My grandmother, whom he married as a promise to a fellow soldier who was with him in Ethiopia and died there, gave him three daughters. A disgrace, according to him. These are just a couple of facts that could open like Chinese boxes; episodes of domestic bullying which had repercussions on the lives of those who were close to him. My grandfather was an ordinary man, whose arrogance was for many years justified by the classic excuse that after all, he was still the father, the husband, and he had to be respected. If we consider this attitude, going beyond the intimate, we can see how beneath the phrase ‘Italians are good people’, there is a minefield of underground violence. Sometimes it is not even recognized, discussed or thought about, because hidden by fixed roles that cannot be questioned; roles that permeate a society that claims to be one of the great free and fair democracies of our time. Looking

at it today, the question is not very different from back then. It is exactly in the ordinary man that the dynamics of power, suffered or exercised in the structures that make up everyday life, are hidden. It is precisely in the normalization of certain relational and power dynamics that colonial, gender, identity and class violence is rooted and passed on, transferred and amplified without question to subsequent generations. My grandparents’ house is a house like many others. Material goods have infinite potential for collectivization and discussion of a past that has not yet been analyzed, because they carry memories and situations. It is the discussion about inheritance itself that would be the healing process to cultivate, whereas a material inheritance often leads to endless disputes. The conversation of who gets what highlights a lack of ability to share, and is linked to an economic value or right of use rather than the immaterial information and narratives inherited objects contain. Inheritance is a treasure, or a problem, depending on how we see it. The past can teach us, or block us, depending on how we perceive it. A memory can be a pleasure or a trauma, depending on how we have experienced, internalized and processed it. Understanding ourselves and our things as a microcosm, the basic unit of society, that implies and corresponds to a whole series of issues related to property, struggle, individualism and dynamics of power, we could ask: How might we share and unhinge dominant relationships with materiality, in order to create common rituals of production, care and community rather than territories to be conquered and maintained?

{ mending }

They are wires that hold us up, wires that strangle us Like webs they run between you and me (..) Puppets hanging from threads that our hands pull That knot themselves and sometimes escape Threads of conversations lost and then resumed without ever coming to an end Dark red threads that embroider indecipherable coded messages That tie your docile wrists to simple memories (..) Lost in the same labyrinth we follow a ball of yarn But the thread we chase is the same one And one day we’ll run through the finish line together And we will finally be without threads between us Impatient kite leashes tugging at each other To break free and get lost and chase each other in the wind1

Mending is a common, basic action that has lost ground in contemporary times more used to the disposable. It can refer to sewing, but also to patching, with any available material, relying on one’s own resources, referring to one’s limits. It is a provisional, but very personal, creative and unconventional action. It does not refer to a professional skill, but rather to an immediate and compelling need, a DIY attitude and a capacity of resistance.

When I think of mending as sewing, I think of the repetitiveness of the gestures; of the constancy and slowness that characterize this ancestral practice; of the patience that allows, from thin and apparently weak threads, to strengthen, create and transform. But it also means repairing, reconnecting something torn. Mending relationships. Taking a step back, rethinking, looking from another perspective, revisiting. It has a healing power on the one hand, and subversive potentiality on the other: it is the possibility to self-manufacture, to be able to create and change the shape of predefined situations. It is joining elements, systems and objects that were disconnected. Threads and connections as a possibility to network, to connect people, places and realities that share similar histories without even knowing it. Thinking about a decolonial practice, the act of mending recalls a domestic process yet takes it to a different level, going beyond the intimate and the private to connect, and indeed to tie up with, the public and the collective. Networking, connecting thoughts and experiences. A collective ritual amplifies its soothing potential by sharing difficulties. Looking at the colonial as a systemic network of repeated violence and injustice, weaving relationships is a transversal, continuous and necessary act of daily resistance.

– Laura Fiorio

1. Frankie HI-NRG, from the song Fili (album: La morte dei miracoli, Sony Music, 1997) 51

Fulfilment Center port of rotterdam

Fulfilment Center Innocence Intimate Tales of Cybernetic Labor and Racial Desire at the Port of Rotterdam Denisse Vega de Santiago

Preface

Dutch girls love big, black dick! It was nearly 3pm, and as usual I was late for my shift. I was walking so rashly to the fulfilment center, that I barely saw the graffiti on the metal plaque of the little wood opening. It read: “Dutch girls love big, black dick!”, followed by an illustrative drawing. Once inside the windowless architecture of the fulfilment center, I put on the industrial shoes, thermal jacket and gloves, and secured the scanner to my arm. As I walked towards the fridges, getting familiar with the loud cheesy music and the smell of fresh vegetables, I saw the director supervising a couple of brown workers who were placing a huge new bright red sign on the back wall of the online supermarket’s chilled area: “Work Hard, Play Hard!” The director, an extremely rich white Dutchman, had become even richer after the Covid-19 lockdowns. The sign was clearly meant to be read by all 400 warehouse workers, mostly brown bodies from Dutch Caribbean colonies, immigrants from Eastern Europe and from other peripheries of the world. As I witnessed this scene, I thought back to the “Dutch [mostly white] girls love big, black [playful] dick!”. Now I get it.

My Zionist ex-lover who tasted like strawberries Watching him sleep next to her, still naked, she was desperate for him to wake up. There was something she was dying to ask. When he had texted her to have dinner the night before, it had really caught her by surprise. After all, she hadn’t seen or heard from him in seven years, since their brief but passionate affair had ended. Back then, she was a young Mexican immigrant who had just started working at the fulfilment center, and he, an extremely good looking Russian-Dutch security guard. After dinner, to a bar, then her place. Just as they had done seven years ago. As they were making out on her couch, with that same urgent passion as so many years ago, she had noticed something that made her laugh to herself, hoping he wouldn’t notice. All these years, she had thought his lips tasted like strawberries, but now she realized it was the sweet & sour sauce of the bacalao

broodjes they had ordered to go just some hours ago at that Suriname’s place. Lol. When he finally opened his eyes, he burrowed into the sheets and looked at her with that charming smile. She smiled back, and almost instantly asked: “Do you still believe Jewish people are smarter than the rest of the world?”. “Google it, it’s true”, he said.

The Robotic Hairy Cow As the intense sunlight woke her up, she felt her body unusually warm and big, as if she were inside a massive bottarga. Her now hairy arms were well equipped, the same scanner now an intrinsic part of them. Two of her four legs were not entirely hairy but metallic and long, still wearing industrial boots. She recognized the grass she was in — it was next to the industrial boulevard where the fulfilment center was. She had now turned into one of the many hairy cow workers brought to the port of Rotterdam to cut the grass. Her job now was no longer to pick and fill totes with groceries middle-class Rotterdammers had ordered online, but to keep the grass short. Eventually, the robotic hairy cow was given a promotion. She was transferred to a well-known park in Amsterdam-Zuid, where she joined another team of robotic hairy cows. Her primary job now was to prevent white gay Dutchmen from having sexual intercourse in the grass nearby.

{ desirefulfilment }

To be fulfilled means “to be satisfied or happy because of fully developing one’s abilities or character”. When we use the -ful of fulfill in a word like desire, it becomes desireful, a quality. To be desireful means “to be filled with desire: eager.” Desirefulfil-ment is a term born out of the coldness of the freezers of the fulfilment center. It was conceived during an evening shift, between the aisles D and E, at the moment when the hand/scanner of the cybernetic picker immigrant being I have become reached the plastic skin of the pink hummus, located on shelf CHD-088-14-1. This fast-speed desirefulfilled game1 2 3, was invented by advanced capitalism, to extract and capture4 our racialized desires and violent passions,5 until exhaustion. To desirefulfil the fulfilment center is to theorize it as a site of “collective racial delirium”, in Franz Fanon’s words. To desirefulfil is to think with and through the fulfilment center as a container and retainer packed full of the viscosities and intensities of the racialized affects of us, its breathers,6 the cybernetic immigrant workers. To desirefulfil the fulfilment center is to throw ourselves in, with and through this viscous soup, fuel of the racialized capitalist cosmology of desire.7 It is to be attentive to its extractivist machinery of innocent whiteness,8 so we can perceive the affect of structural racism differently and much more intimately.9 Then perhaps we can start unpacking a different kind of mythological cybernetic tale for us, its worker-breathers. As a way out, as an alternative viscous soup fuel for other modes of being, breathing and relating in the anti-extractivist, antiracist cosmic machinery of desire.

notes for a glossary of desirefulfilment 1, 2. a desireful game, Mary Poppins, Vega de Santiago. In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and... snap! The job’s a game // She felt good. She went faster. Obviously. How couldn’t she? They are always looking. Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘Loving Gamification, Profaning Gamification’. Volume, Playbor (56), pp. 39-43. & 3. profaning gamification, Agamben. The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity in vain. These behaviors are not ef- faced but deactivated and thus open to a new possible use. Agamben, G. (2005). Profanations. New York City: Zone Books, pp. 85. 4. extraction & capture, Galloway. What if there is a form of affective expenditure that cannot be recuperated? Galloway, A., Jepson, G., Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘The Rapture of Play: interview with Alexander R. Galloway’, Volume, Playbor (56), pp. 6-9. 5. violent libidinal passions, Mouffe, Freud. Of course, “passions” can also be of an individual nature, but I have chosen to use the term with its more violent connotations, because it [passions] allows me to underline a dimension of conflict and to suggest a confrontation between collective political identities - two aspects that I take to be constitutive of politics // Freud brought to the fore the crucial role played by affective libidinal bounds in processes of collective identification. Mouffe, C. (2017). ‘The Role of Affects in Agonistic Politics’. Cherepanyn, V., Havranek, V., & Stejskalova, T. (Eds.) 68 NOW. Kiev: Visual Culture Research Center, tranzit.cz, Archive Books Berlin, pp. 69-81. 6. the viscosity of the abject, Kristeva, Morton. -fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear” —a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer // Art as climate. I mean precisely art not as reified or distanced thing over but yonder, but as infectious, viscous givenness from which one finds oneself incapable of feeling oneself, like Luce Irigaray’s air. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. // Morton, T. (2015). ‘Elementality’. Cohen, J., Duckert, L. (Eds.) (2015). Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69-81. 7. breathers, Choy. “Here is the unpaid cost: the externality,” I remember him saying. “These are real costs, but they are externalized, meaning they are not paid.” “But someone does pay,” he continued. “Who pays?” He waited a beat, then answered himself. “Breathers pay.” Breathers pay. Choy, T. (2021). ‘Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning’. in Papadopoulos, D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., Myers, N. (Eds.), Reactivating Elements. Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice. London: Duke University Press, pp. 231-256. 8. white innocence, Wekker. It is my— admittedly ambitious and iconoclastic—aim to write an ethnography of dominant white Dutch self-representation. An unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and affects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant meaningmaking processes. Wekker, G (2016). White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 9. queering the matter of race, Ahmed. The “matter’’ of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing oneself or being seen as white or black or mixed does affect what one “can do,” or even where one can go, which can be redescribed in terms of what is and is not within reach. If we begin to consider what is affective about the “unreachable,” we might even begin the task of making “race’’ a rather queer matter. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.

– Denisse Vega de Santiago

Franska Tomten (the French Plot) gothenburg

Franska Tomten Peter Nylund

Franska Tomten, or the ‘French Plot’ in the Gothenburg harbor is a small plot of land that, as part of a trade deal between Sweden and France in 1772, gave the French free trading rights in the port of Gothenburg in return for the Caribbean colony of Saint Barthelemy, where the primary business activity was in the trade of enslaved humans through the transatlantic slave trade. Today, the French Plot is what one might call a non-place, in the sense that Augé used the term to describe generic spaces, often places of waiting, such as airport terminals and bus stations. The people who travel through these spaces daily do not confer to them a feeling of place, nor attach any significance to them. The French Plot is a non-place that, for the pedestrian walking by on Postgatan, or for the driver steering their vehicle past Packhusplatsen, reveals no historical interest or significance. It is a place you simply go through or travel past. But it is also - and more assertively so because of its invisibility as a place of historical significance - a non-place that, if one knows what one is looking at, serves to illustrate a prime example of the general collective amnesia of Sweden’s transatlantic colonial ambitions and endeavors. It can also serve to illustrate what could be read as willful ignorance and a continuation of the very same paradigm in the country’s ongoing extractive policies, both domestically on colonized Sami land, and abroad in the country’s continued involvement in arms sales for war zones, which often affects former countries and subjects of the larger European colonial enterprise. “Collective amnesia,” a term borrowed from South African poet Koleka Putuma, aptly describes this society-wide phenomenon, and can be seen distilled in the small plot of land that is Franska Tomten. The term illustrates the attempt to relegate to the proverbial “dustbin of history” a historical fact that, subdued by willful ignorance, is meant to be forgotten. Forgotten, yet never hidden. Rather, the site today is “coloniality hidden in plain sight,” as the Transatlantic Shipping Co. building on the site does not make any attempts to cover up this history.1 With an imposing presence on the site, the building celebrates this history rather than trying to hide it. Adorning the walls both on its facade and inside its lobby are reliefs depicting aspects of the colonial enterprise, telling a story of adventure, conquest, heroism, and violence.

The last two iterations of the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) have addressed the history of this site in several ways, interrogating its connections to global capitalism and the larger European colonial project. So, one might ask, with this work already done, why continue to engage in artistic research in this place, where several attempts to unearth this history have already been made? Simply, it is because the work is far from done. But, to be able to take this research further, a change of perspective is needed. In engaging with this historical site as a non-place, the questions that need to be asked are: How is history playing out in the local present, in a city that is one of the most segregated in Northern Europe? What kind of actions can make visible and interrogate collective amnesia? And, what counter-narratives can be formed as acts of resistance, to counteract this willful ignorance and imposing amnesia?

1. Sawyer, Lena and Nana Osei-Kofi “‘listening’ with Gothenburg’s Iron Well: engaging the imperial archive through Black feminist methodologies and arts-based research” 2020, Feminist Review 125, p.56 60

{ (Decolonial) AestheSis }

(Decolonial) AestheSis is a concept that can be employed as a decolonial option/ tool when undertaking an attempt to delink art practices from the colonial matrix of power. The concept AestheSis is laid forth as a decolonial option by Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez (2013) when seeking to break with the hegemony of the Eurocentric concept of AestheTics as we understand it today. The words and concepts AestheSis and AestheTics both originate in ancient Greece, but as the concept of Europe did not exist in the classical age when these terms were coined, these notions cannot be seen as Eurocentric in their origin. The transformation of the meaning of the word aesthetic into a normative theory happened centuries later, when Kant “mutated it into a key concept to regulate sensing the beautiful and the sublime”.1 And, as Fred Moten has shown, this regulative discourse on the aesthetic that Kant instated “is inseparable from the question of race as a mode of conceptualizing and regulating human diversity… grounding and justifying inequality and exploitation…”.2 It was this transformation of modern AestheTics into a regulating and standardizing concept of beauty that was projected or superimposed upon the world during the colonial expansion of the European powers. AestheSis, the classical Greek word to describe the “plurality of the organic senses” was thus condensed and reduced to a single visual sense in the AestheTic, as simultaneously “all non-Western ways of sensing were denied” by these universalist claims.3 Therefore, it can be claimed that AestheTics as we understand it today is “nothing else than a form of sensory colonization, that dovetails with other economic and political forms of control”.4

As a decolonial option, AestheSis seeks to stand as an epistemic critique against Western, Eurocentric ideas of how we should understand art and its possible uses. AestheSis can act to renegotiate and reformulate the concept of art, to encompass full sensory experiences of knowledge production that may prove to have emancipatory potential. This uncoupling can be achieved through an acknowledgement of suppressed alternative practices - subaltern so-called “everyday” practices and forms of making - to delink and liberate the senses from the regulative constraints encompassed in the AestheTic. It is from the “embodied consciousness of the colonial wound” that decolonial AestheSis begins, by both making visible - unveiling the wound - and at the same time mov[ing] towards the healing, the recognition, the dignity of these aesthetic practices that have been written out of the canon of modern aestheTics.5

– Peter Nylund

1. Mignolo, Walter and Rolando Vazquez “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings” Social Text Online, July 15, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesiscolonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ 2. Moten, Fred Stolen Life Duke Press, 2018 p.3 3. Shutz, Marine “Decolonial Aesthetics” ECHOES https://keywordsechoes.com/decolonial-aesthetics 4. Ibid. 5. Mignolo and Vazquez 63

Genealogy of Swedish Hydropower stockholm, julevädno, and in between

Out of Control When I Turn My Power On Conduction of Swedish Hydropower Sara Davin Omar

An ordinary morning in Södermalm, Stockholm. The scaffold outside the window blocks the daylight which would otherwise stream into the apartment. The building hoist moves vertically up the facade on the other side of my block, a building from 1968. Click. My hand on the switcher and the small apartment is bathed in light. I move slowly towards the coffee machine, connecting the cable to the power. Suddenly the whole apartment turns dark. Did I forget to pay the bill? What is going on? Electricity’s omnipresence has made it invisible to a point that only its absence is noticed. Needless to say, electricity has been crucial for the consolidation of the Modern world and the capital-intensive urban realms. During the 1920s-1970s, when the political concept of folkhemmet (the people’s home) reigned in Sweden, electricity was not only fundamental in rationalizing the physical expansion of its welfare state. As in other nations on the verge of modernization, it also became a rhetorical figure for artists and architects. The authors of the Swedish functionalist manifesto acceptera, for example, urged their colleagues to follow the steps of progress by designing for an electrified society (Asplund et. Al, 1931).1 After almost 100 years, the leitmotif is now power marketed as ‘green’, allowing for an uncritical proliferation of electricity. What are the origins of this ‘eco-friendly’ power? Already around 1900, the gaze of the Stockholm-based state-authority Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen was directed towards the northernmost parts of Scandinavia, resulting in the construction of manifold hydroelectric plants over the course of the decades. When innovations in long-distance power transfer were materialized in the more than 1000 km power line connecting Bårjås with Västerås (Vattenfall, 2022), excess power from the northern rivers was directed to the southern parts of the country.2 Electric interconnectivity was now achieved on a national level and contributed to the metabolic rift dividing “wilderness” from “center” (Foster, 2000).3 Due to the proximity to energy-consuming mines such as the one in Girun (Kiruna), the choice of the northern rivers was strategic within a capitalist and biopolitical logic. The choice was also fueled by institutionalized racism towards the Sámi people propagated by Statens Institut för Rasbiologi (Hagerman, 2015).4 Subjugated through Christianization and suppression of the Sámi language,

(Lundmark, 2005) their lands were consequently perceived as vacant despite their having lived in the region long before the creation of the Swedish nation-state.5 This further motivated large-scale interventions which altered the ecosystems to a point that many were alienated from what constituted their means of production and an important part of their cultural identity. Despite tying together north with south in a physical manner, these switchgears, dams, and power lines are not often understood as the colonizing instruments they are, accumulating profit to corporations far from the water sources. Instead, they are mostly seen as neutrally utilitarian or in some cases beautiful embodiments of national romantic or functionalist ideals. Asymmetric relationships between places such as Stockholm and the village of Bårjås (Porjus), one of the sites of the 15 state-owned hydroelectric plants on the Julevädno (Lule River), are a conditio sine qua non for the growth of the capital-intensive, congested realms, and consequently my own existence within such an environment. To portray this, the genealogy of Swedish hydropower is considered as a long site of interconnected socio-technical systems, zigzagging over various territories and temporalities. “Next stop Hornstull”. Due to a signal error, I am late when I get off the crowded subway. A street vendor obtrusively blocks me on my way to Clas Ohlson. “With this deal you get cheap and green power. We have student reduction”. I take a flyer, but I am not sure I will consider the offer.

1. Asplund, G. (red.) (1931). Acceptera. Stockholm: Tiden. 2. Vattenfalls historia och kulturarv. (2021). Ett stamnät blir till. Available at: <https://historia.vattenfall.se/ stories/hela-sverige-blir-elektriskt/ett-stamnat-blir-till> [Accessed 3 April 2022]. 3. Foster, J., (2000). Marx’s ecology. New York, N.Y: Monthly Review, p.ix. 4. Hagerman, M., (2015). Käraste Herman: rasbiologen Herman Lundborgs gåta. (Dear Herman: the riddle of the racial biologist Herman Lundborg). Stockholm: Norstedts, pp. 82-83. 5. Lundmark, L., (2005) The Sami: An indigenous People in Sweden. Stockholm: Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Consumer Affairs and the Sami Parliament, pp. 10-11. 66

{ conduction }

A conductor is an object or type of material that allows the flow of electric current in one or more directions. Conduction is the transmission between conductors. The word is derived from the Latin word condūcō meaning to lead, draw together, assemble, and to connect or unite. It is also related to the word dūcō, meaning to guide. In a world shaped by Modern thought, knowledge has been compartmentalized into separate entities, engendering an understanding of objects as things-inthemselves (Latour, 1993).1 In such a context, a disruptive project can emerge by tracing different flows, which will highlight the interconnection between matter that tends to be seen as disparate. Using the etymology of conduction as a conceptual framework leads to disclosing the connections brought about by the emergence of hydropower as well as the guiding principles, or ideologies, behind it. Starting to read phenomena as conductors means opening up for a reading of objects as hybrid. A circuit diagram is an engineering device that in a simplified manner represents conduction within a closed system. Shifting scales, the diagram can be misused to visualize the flows of the colonizing apparatus of hydropower. Such a scheme will be an assembly of objects, sites, events, and individuals, interlinked by the conduction of materia and ideology.

– Sara Davin Omar

1. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p.4. 68

The Nordic Art Association’s Residency stockholm

The Nordic Open Call Sara Rossling

‘Care’ is also a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care center stage means recognizing and embracing our interdependencies.1 -The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, 2020 After World War II, the Nordic Art Association was founded as a cooperation between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; the autonomies of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland; and the Sámi People, as a means of creating a unified representative voice for Nordic art. It aimed to rebuild networks and create bridges between artists in the Nordic countries. Over time, the situation and perspectives changed, and the Nordic branches slowly drifted apart, some falling off entirely. Yet, the association’s name has remained, and the collaboration that cultivated a ‘nordicness’ has generated a distinct history and heritage. Today, the Swedish section in Stockholm, NKF, is one of few remaining. On a new itinerary since the early 2000s, its main activity departs from an international residency located in the historic building Malongen, telling the story of the city and its urbanization. Built as a textile factory in the second half of the 1600s, Malongen was originally accompanied by gardens and tobacco plantations. The former factory is now one of Stockholm’s oldest preserved industrial buildings, and in the hands of the city it has undergone restorations to be used as emergency housing, a hospital, and a primary school. Malongen is managed by the Municipality-run Stadsholmen, which specializes in houses with cultural-historical value, taking care of the building’s architecture and light yellow plastered facade. Since the 1960s, the premises of the U-shaped factory have served as artists’ studios, conveyed via the city’s general studio queue, and the former school janitor’s residence has become a guest studio apartment and a creative meeting place. As a domestic space, it resonates with the hands-on caring carried out within kinships, often depicted through the nuclear family. Society relies on such when cuts arise in the public infrastructure, which is why it is essential to keep these spaces accessible and imagine kinships beyond the traditional family. The two single beds in the studio apartment invite collective art practices and accompanying guests. Throughout decades, gestures of conservation and care circulate this site.

I enter this project by scrutinizing my curatorial practice and the organization I’ve been part of for two years. I have found that NKF lacks a statement for how we position the current residency in relation to the organization’s history and to the current times we are living in. As the initial art alliance in the north is gone, such a geographical frame is deceptive for NKF’s independent position and global reach. In parallel to this, there is a tendency towards self-righteous thinking amongst many residencies, ours included, which see themselves as sites of hospitality, though with little introspection on the conditions defining such hospitality. In this context, the Open Call protocol is a mirror of the residency’s openness, and who can be invited. At the same time, the protocol can be adjusted and the conditions of the residency rewritten, to reconsider the imposed roles of host and guest. As the material of a palimpsestic work process, the Open Call protocol is moved to the front, putting the historical narratives to the back and creating a space to express what is important to an international residency in Stockholm today.

1. Care Collective, The (2020) The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso. 72

{ palimpsestic }

To call something palimpsestic points to it having the ability to be altered; to its purpose being able to extend to one other than its original intent. Simultaneously, the term indicates that what caused this alteration or change is a physically demanding process of reworking, and a conscious act of reformulation. It is rooted in the 1660s Latin palimpsestus and Greek palimpsestos, meaning ‘scraped or rubbed again’, with palin meaning ‘again, back’. A palimpsest refers to a handwritten document whose text has been scraped off from the surface — though not completely erased — to give space for a new one. The key is in the meeting between layers of utterances or expressions — the one placed on top appears most clear, though is transparent enough to let through the traces of past events beneath. The remains have been left visible on the material surface, often legible as a protocol over its process — a palimpsest. A palimpsestic approach to sites doesn’t deny their past, nor does it treat history as a perpetual narration. Rather, it keeps history open to reformulations through active bodily engagement. As chairperson of a 75-year old art association which rests upon its distinct Nordic history to frame its current organization — today, driven independently as a residency — I would like to suggest palimpsestic as a tool for us, the board of the organization, to reposition this history. Pushing the organization’s history to the background — whilst keeping it present as a link to the past — would make room for more urgent and pertinent statements in the foreground. Material at work in this process is the protocol of the Open Call — a form reformulated over time that sets the rules and structure of who can attend the residency and the quid pro quo such a protocol suggests. How could we, the board of NKF, engage more physically in the reworking of this protocol, to harness the spirit of the palimpsest?

– Sara Rossling

photo: Jens Haendeler

BIOS

Decolonizing Architecture Course participants

Denisse Vega de Santiago es una arquitecta mexicana, editora, independent curator, writer, former warehouse worker, and former epileptic body, based mostly in Rotterdam. Her practice is concerned with phenomenologies of race and whiteness, contemporary forms of labor, critical space theory, and feminist decolonial thought. Her latest text is The Circus of Essential Work (e-flux Architecture, 2021). Denisse has collaborated with Van Abbemuseum, Studio Joost Grootens, and Volume Magazine, amongst others. Her current project, Fulfilment Center Innocence, is supported by the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and The New Centre for Research & Practice. Denisse holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Leiden University and an MA in Interior Architecture: Research + Design from Piet Zwart Institute. Francesca Gattello is an Italian Social Designer based in Palermo. She graduated from Politecnico of Milan in Interior and Industrial Design and is co-founder of Marginal Studio. In her work she challenges the established system of Design through an experience-based approach that combines theory and grounded practice. Her research explores notions of ‘material culture’ in the Mediterranean areas, and ‘civic and collective uses of means of production’, focusing on the development of participatory practices to create a shared common heritage in marginalized contexts and with underprivileged communities. Zeno Franchini is an Italian Social Designer based in Palermo. He graduated from Politecnico di Milano and Design Academy of Eindhoven, with an expertise in participatory processes and vernacular culture. As co-founder of Marginal Studio, he focuses on the creation of objects and aesthetics to reinvent traditions and deal with contemporary socio-environmental issues through co-design workshops. Currently, he is engaging with communities in Palermo on issues surrounding environmental struggle and inclusion of newcomers, collaborating with local craftsmen and establishing space for design production in neglected spaces.

Laura Fiorio is a freelance photographer based in Berlin. In her artistic practice she deals with urban spaces and the political tension between the private and public spheres. Her projects, developed through choral narratives, interact with existing archives and materials, questioning the power dynamics embedded in the editing process of images as memories; their institutionalized use and hence their critical and subversive potential. Currently she is working on several individual and commissioned projects, including ‘The Whole Life: Archives and Reality’ commissioned by HKW, Berlin. She has been guest professor at the Universidad de Baja California, Tijuana, MX and University for Arts and Cultures, Ulan Bator, MN, among others. Laure Catugier (French, based in Berlin) is a visual artist with a background in architecture. She explores the diversity of post-war architecture through photography, video, installation and performance. Her research focuses on the social aspect of modernist buildings and in particular on collective housing and its progressive norms, spaces, forms and uses. Currently, Laure’s practice is oriented towards art in the public space, which allows her to share her work with a wider public, not necessarily initiated. This orientation is in line with an older series of in-situ art projects realized during numerous artistic residencies abroad. Peter Nylund is a photographer and artistic researcher currently based in Gothenburg, Sweden. From an educational background in Political Science and in Fine Arts, Peter combines the two disciplines and in his research to interrogate the representational politics of the photographic image. He seeks to investigate the possibilities of the utilization of art as an instrument for building community, and to construct counter-narratives against assimilationist politics. Sara Davin Omar is a Stockholm-based architect with previous academic background from the EPFL (CH) and KTH (SE). By reading Modern and contemporary architecture as conditioned by concepts such as the nation state, ethnonationalism, capitalism, and patriarchy, Sara seeks to demystify the “neutral” and ultimately speculate on alternatives. Sara Rossling is an independent curator and writer based in Sweden, working with exhibitions, research-based art projects, public art and programs. With a Posthuman feminist perspective, she explores forms of agency and the intersections of contemporary art, societal issues, and narratives back and forth in time. Currently, she is the chairperson of the Swedish section of the Nordic Art Association (NKF) in Stockholm. Michelle Castro is an Brazilian architect and exhibition designer. She is co-founder of LAMA.SP an artist-run space located in São Paulo.

photo: Steffie de Gaetano

WHAT DOES IT MEAN "TO DECOLONIZE"? 4

KKH (Royal Institute of Art) Stockholm Alessandro Petti Marie-Louise Richards

Students 2021/2022 Denisse Vega de Santiago Francesca Gattello Zeno Franchini Laura Fiorio Laure Catugier Peter Nylund Sara Davin Omar Sara Rossling Michelle Castro

Graphic design Diego Segatto Proof-reading and editing Hannah Clarkson

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online www.daas.academy

Issued in May 2022