ENTITY OF DECOLONIZATION
THIRD ANNUAL GATHERING
Borgo Rizza, Carlentini (SR), Sicily
May 6–10, 2024
Following on from the previous two editions of the Difficult Heritage Summer School – a collaborative effort between the Municipality of Carlentini, the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, the University of Basel, along with the art installation “Ente di Decolonizzazione: Borgo Rizza” by DAAR – in May 2024 the annual gathering will encompass a week-long intensive program consisting of collective learning, interventions, and performances, rooted in the three core branches of the Entity of Decolonization:
- Pedagogy
- Art and Architecture
- Commoning
This year the hosting institutions are the Municipality of Carlentini, the DAAS program at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, IASPIS (the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts), DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), and Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.
- PEDAGOGY
The Difficult Heritage Summer School III: Under Repair is jointly organized by DAAS, the School of Architecture at the RCA and IASPIS. Taking place in Borgo Rizza, the event questions and mobilizes the notion of repair around the possible reuse of buildings, monuments and environments affected by modern/colonial violence and exclusion. To do so, the School invites participants to discuss new approaches in architecture, design and preservation through the lenses of racial, social and environmental justice.
- ART AND ARCHITECTURE
A series of artistic and architectural interventions will animate the proceedings, culminating in the bonfire of the art installation “Ente di Decolonizzazione: Borgo Rizza” by DAAR (which was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale). The public performance is a ritual to liberate the Entity of Decolonization from its fascist ghosts, and to begin a new chapter for the realization of a “decolonial house” in the vicinity of Borgo Rizza.
- COMMONING
“Casa Decoloniale” is a long-term experiment to cultivate forms of commoning that transcend conventional notions of “public” and “private”, “host” and “guest”, “local” and “foreigner”. Linked to other commoning projects initiated in Puglia (Campo Paradiso), Sweden (Summer House), and Palestine (Jericho), Casa Decoloniale is poised to materialize in the Carlentini territory in the forthcoming years.
We want to acknowledge that this gathering is happening at very difficult times. We find ourselves in an unprecedented assault on Palestinians, marked by a highly dangerous escalation led by the US government, coupled with a suppression of critical voices in Western institutions. We are entering one of the most obscure chapters of Western history. Spaces for critical conversations are closing down; we see the annual gathering as an alternative platform to continue our conversations and actions elsewhere.
Format
In accord with the open-ended nature of the Entity of Decolonization and the principle of commoning resources, each day is hosted by some of the groups taking part in the gathering.
Participants are encouraged to take part in the program either as hosts (by being fully responsible for both the conceptual and logistical aspects) or as guests (attending the program activities). Each session will be facilitated by a host who is part of the confederation. The objective is to maintain a decentralized structure and prevent logistical challenges or concentrations of responsibility. In a similar vein, guests are considered active participants.
In the mornings we will conduct working sessions in smaller groups called “learning with”, each of them led by one of the participants. These are aimed at presenting existing practices and projects as methodologies that everyone might apply to different sites. In the afternoons we will convene for collective assemblies where the morning work is discussed and shared. Dinners are a communal moment of exchange and restoration, to which everyone is invited.
If you wish to present or organize something, please feel free to contact the coordinators: entityofdecolonization@gmail.com
PROGRAM
Sunday, May 5
10:00-18:00 Arrivals
19:00 Opening of Difficult Heritage: Under Repair
(self-introductions, reconnecting with previous editions)
Monday, May 6
Difficult Heritage Summer School
Hosted by DAAS and RCA School of Architecture
[in English with translation]
10:00 > Learning with: An Anti-atlas of Colonial-Fascist Architecture (led
by Husam Abusalem and Stefan Fuchs)
11:00 > Learning with: The stratigraphy of Borgo Rizza (led by Silvia
Susanna, Steffie de Gaetano, Alice Pontiggia)
> Learning with: Your Decolonial Entity (led by Robin Dingemans)
> A Glossary for Repair-Work (led by Thomas Aquilina)
13:00 Lunch
17:00 Collective assembly
20:30 Communal Dinner
Tuesday, May 7
Difficult Heritage Summer School
Hosted by DAAS and RCA School of Architecture
[in English with translation]
10:00 > Learning with: Grain communities (led by Sara Pellegrini)
> Learning with: Two Hours Ago I Fell in Love (led by Sveva Crisafulli)
11:30 > Learning with: Southern landscapes (led by Megumi Nakahashi)
> Learning with: Hostis (led by Ahmed Al-Nawas)
13:00 Lunch
17:00 Collective assembly
20:30 Communal Dinner
Wednesday, May 8
Commoning the Private: Casa Decoloniale
Hosted by DAAR
[in Italian with translation]
10:00 Learning with: Campo Paradiso (led by Judith Wielander and
Luigi Coppola)
11:00 Assembly: Commoning the Private, with the participation of
the citizens of Carlentini
13:00 Lunch
15:00 Press conference with the Mayor of Carlentini
and installation of the plaque of the Entity of Decolonization
17:00 Collective walk through the old town of Carlentini
20:30 Communal Dinner
Thursday, May 9
Difficult Heritage Symposium: Under Repair
Hosted by the School of Architecture (RCA)
[in English with translation]
10:00 Decolonisation and Repair. In Palestine (led by Sandi Hilal,
Alessandro Petti, Husam Abusalem and Emilio Distretti)
12:00 Seeding the Uncommon Commons (led by Cooking Sections /
CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA)
13:00 Lunch
17:00 Assembly: “Architecture of Repair ” (led by RCA and guests)
20:30 Communal Dinner
Friday, May 10
Urgent Pedagogies
Hosted by IASPIS
[in English with translation]
10:00 Learning with: Urgent Pedagogies (led by Magnus Ericson, Pelin
Tan and Amalia Katopodis)
13:00 Lunch
15:00 > Urgent Pedagogies workshop (led by Magnus Ericson, Pelin
Tan and Chiara Siravo)
> Learning with: My Fascist Grandpa (led by Laura Fiorio, Mario
Margani and Ginevra Ludovici)
17:00 Internal Assembly
18:30 Public Assembly
20:00 Performance by DAAR: Burning the Facade
21:00 Communal Dinner + closing party
SITE
The rural settlement of Borgo Rizza, near Carlentini in Southern Sicily, was built by the Fascist government in 1940. Under the aegis of the Ente di colonizzazione del latifondo siciliano (“Entity for the colonization of the Sicilian Latifundia”), its construction was part of a broader plan to “colonize” those landscapes of the Italian South – swamps and open land – that were deemed empty and unproductive, not yet touched by agricultural modernity.
Rural Sicily today embodies a contradictory geography. It belongs to the West, thus benefiting from the last remains of the welfare state – but also partaking in Europe’s regime of racialization and border controls. At the same time, it is far removed from the centers of capital accumulation and knowledge production. The region around Carlentini shares with the rest of Southern Europe paltry salaries, the shutting down of basic services, unemployment, emigration. The architectural conditions of the city itself show the scars of the impoverishment: much of the old town of Carlentini is empty, and the buildings are in disrepair after many former residents moved to larger cities, or away from Sicily altogether.
Upon these rubbles, a new ultra-extractive economy – international tourism – looms on the horizon. To appeal to tourists, local and global investors join efforts to appropriate folklore and popular traditions, which take on an identitarian, a-historical meaning – a last resort, perhaps, when more substantial possibilities of belonging and coexistence have become difficult to imagine. With tourism and emigration comes a new pace of the seasons, standing at the opposite of the traditional agricultural cycle: summer (which used to be a time of rest) is a period of hyper-activity and exhaustion (the bodily exhaustion of seasonal labourers, but also the heat and droughts).
At the same time, the legacy of peasant struggles that marked the history of Carlentini in the postwar period has nourished new forms of organizing and resistance: farmers that foster biodiversity against agri-business, associations that build for those who choose to stay, activists that oppose the infrastructuralization and militarization of the territory.
The Entity of Decolonization takes this complex territorial condition as the starting point to imagine a different role for a place like Carlentini and Borgo Rizza as sites for a commoning experiment to think and practice the decolonization of Europe from within its borders.
We ask: How can the Entity of Decolonization avoid being yet another one-off moment of intensity? What practices and temporalities can enable a decolonial discourse throughout the year? How do we avoid a nostalgic harking back to peasant tradition, and instead create our own rituals to give a different rhythm to the year? As critical spatial practitioners, can we imagine a future for towns at the edges of Europe beyond the paradigm of touristic extractivism?
As scholars and students associated with comparatively wealthy institutions of Northern Europe, how do we become aware of our position and avoid unconsciously reiterating the existing imbalances between North and South?
CONCEPT
In Fascist times the term colonizzazione was often deployed within Italy itself, reflecting the word’s Latin root in the verb colere, “to cultivate” or “to inhabit”. Under the guise of breaking up large estates and reallocating the land to small-size farms, Fascism sought to make rural Sicily into a place where capitalist agriculture modeled on Northern Italy (i.e. one based on the heavy use of pesticide and machinery, engineered seeds, irrigation and monoculture) could thrive.
Indeed, Borgo Rizza was a site to forge new relationships between built environments, land, soil, and capital. Fascism used modernist architecture to anchor these material relationships onto a new aesthetic and social reality. Borgo Rizza’s main square, like that of other new towns, was designed for social control; its facades, embodying a new generic Mediterranean style, were meant to cut all ties with age-old local forms of construction, all the while concealing a basic, even retrograde spatial organization.
The previous two editions of the Summer School took aim at the architecture of Borgo Rizza, coming up with a range of strategies to reappropriate its built dimension. We now move further and ask: What does repair mean in the epistemic and spatial reorganization of colonially ridden contexts? What will a de-modernization of the soil look like?
Under Repair
To repair means “restoring by replacing”, and refers to finding a “remedy” for something that is “torn” or “broken”. The noun repair cogently addresses the need to fix damage, an injury, loss or harm. Any act of repairing exercises a healing/redemptive power, whether of objects and buildings, territories or people. Beyond the sphere of the physical reparation of decrepit buildings and scarred landscapes, “repair” speaks to the need of future communities to tackle unresolved issues of unpunished crimes, trauma and reparations. By acknowledging the violent dimension of architecture and planning, our conversations will explore how a critical re-interpretation of architectural heritage can initiate a process of repair. Along this path, the Entity of Decolonization will address the need to achieve “epistemic justice” through the recollection of “lost” historical traces and narratives.
Repair is discussed/practiced as a form of return, where the austere buildings of fascist architecture are returned to the common use and living for diverse communities; where the spheres of politics, intimacy and domesticity blur into the public realm as collective rituals.
Several questions will inform our debates: How to reuse villages such as Borgo Rizza, built to celebrate fascist martyrs and settlers in the colonial wars in Africa? Who has the right to re-use them? How to transform them into antidotes to colonialism/fascism? What is the role of colonial/modern architecture in the process of repair? Despite an alleged “permanent immobility”, is there a place for architectural heritage in the planetary struggle for decolonization?
Commoning
The Arabic concept of Al Masha refers to a form of land use that was widespread for millennia across the Middle East and Western Asia. The central aspect of Masha was that it came to existence only through the collective, shared use of the land; as a legal entity, it stopped existing the moment people stopped cultivating the land.
Taking a cue from the history of Al Masha and other communal uses of the land, the gathering will ask: which forms of ownership and of economic (self-)organization and which systems of cultivation and growing can advance a decolonial practice?
PRACTICAL INFO
Sleeping: The Entity of Decolonization will make available a limited number of places in communal accommodation in Borgo Rizza, as well as daily collective dinners (a small monetary contribution might be requested). We will also provide a list of rooms and homes that can be booked in Carlentini.
Arriving in Carlentini:
> The closest international airport is Catania (30 km from Carlentini). The closest train station is Lentini (5 km).
> From Catania airport, you can take a direct train to Lentini station, taking 25 mins (check schedule on trenitalia.com). There is also an AST bus directly to Carlentini, duration 1 hour, departing at: 07:15 / 09:15 / 11:15 / 13:15 / 15:25 / 16:45 / 19:00 / 20:15. Note that both run Monday to Saturday only. On Sunday there is a limited service, with replacement buses by Trenitalia departing at: 11:08 / 17:08 / 19:05 / 21:17.
> We are able to pick up those without a car, but availability is limited. Please let us know if this is the case.
> There are also direct night trains leaving Milan, Bologna, Rome and Naples every evening, and arriving at Lentini the following morning or afternoon. Check times and prices on trenitalia.com.
Local transport: Borgo Rizza is located 6 km away from the town of Carlentini. We will have some form of transportation, but if at all possible for you, please consider renting a car.
> Contact: entityofdecolonization@gmail.com
