Difficult Heritage II: Summer School

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second edition of the Difficult Heritage Summer School seeks to redefine the contours of colonial architectural heritage and the narratives surrounding it. The School raises critical questions about access, re-use, and entitlement to this painful and violent heritage. The program aims to strike the right balance between pre-structured activities and unplanned, spontaneous ones to encourage ownership and proactiveness among all participants, including students, guests, and local citizens. Field trips set the pace for the group as they explore the surroundings and engage with local architectural, industrial, and landscape heritage. Mornings are dedicated to self-organized group activities focused on three main topics:
1. Space & Environment Beyond its modernist and fascist architecture and design, Borgo Rizza embodies and connects conflicting meanings, “othered” spaces, and environments, existing through a series of territorial ramifications. By shifting our attention from buildings to bodies, minds, nature, and territories, these activities aim to challenge traditional approaches to heritage preservation and architectural knowledge.



2. Food & Politics The construction of a mobile kitchen in Borgo Rizza offers an opportunity to shape collective experiences, conviviality, and reciprocity. Around the mobile kitchen designed by marginal studio, participants exchange knowledge and share reflections on collective food preparation, plants, and local cultivation, as well as the histories of migration, labor, and modern forms of exploitation.

3. Discursive Exhibition  The “Discursive Exhibition” is an open process where research, art practice, sensory experiences, and conversations converge to engage the public in questions and practices of critical re-use.

Every afternoon at 5 pm, we gather to share the work, reflections, and ideas 

With this second edition of the Summer School, we aim to continue fostering discourses and practices of healing, reappropriation, and renarration of the spaces and symbols of colonialism and fascism. Our goal is to reactivate the space of the former “Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano” in Borgo Rizza and transform it into a space for critical and decolonial pedagogy.