INAPPROPRIABLE
Archiving fugitive infrastructure across frontier ecologies
Inappropriable investigates spaces, practices and territories beyond their propriety, proprietal and appropriate dimensions in the violent, predatory and armed present looking at its fugitive infrastructures and subtractive politics. Inappropriable is a research, a collective investigation and a condition of possibility which sets out to interrogate practices of inhabitation, infrastructures of life, of marronage and fugitive worldling, focusing on labour ecologies in territories of migration: frontiers where bodies, spaces and labour are reconfigured through extractive and plantation-like capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion.
As a research project, it focuses on the material and temporal conditions of migrant settlements and as spatial thresholds; on agro-industrial ghettos and fugitive or marooned inhabitations, thereby interrogating their production and reproduction across different ecologies, geographies and discursive formations.
As a collective investigation, it allows a diverse and heterogeneous group of researchers to experiment with methodologies (historical and narrative explorations; design and art-based speculations; photography and cartography; activist and situated practices) and to share interests, avenues of research, political preoccupations and trajectories regarding local political activism.
As a possibility, it serves as an infrastructure to observe and engage with a variety of politics of transformation that impact frontier territories of the Black Mediterranean, landscapes of energy transition, neo-colonial ecologies and geographies where space and race are continuously reconfigured through securitarian control and governmental management and erasure.
Inappropriable aspires to become a collective and archipelagic infrastructure of experimentation, connecting a diverse and heterogeneous group of researchers, interested in the intersections between camp and displacement urbanism, inhabitation practices, collective and autonomous housing experiences, as well as energy landscapes and agricultural labour. Inappropriable emerged in 2022 and then expanded its remit through individual Dissertations and PhD research projects (Edoardo Ciuffreda, Manuel Grimaldi, Stefano Mastromarino, Alessandra Faccini, Richard Lee Peragine) in Puglia—specifically around the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone, while stretching over to other geographies, such as Trieste, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon.
In 2022 some members of the collective (Antonio Stopani, Camillo Boano) received a small research fund from the Politecnico di Torino, DIST (Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning) entitled “Al di là del campo. Indagare opacità, forme e visioni del superamento come logica territorial” which looked at the impact of developmental projects carried out by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) to contrast Caporalato. The research in the meantime intercepted and started to support the activist collective “Dar Alassam” in Borgo Mezzanone, composed by migrants inhabiting the Pista and local activists.
In 2024 other members (Stefano Mastromarino, Giovanna Astolfo) were able to join Inappropriable with other small funds supported by the UK AHRC project “Reframing arrival: Transnational perspectives on perceptions, governance and practices – REFRAME”.
The platform is supported through multiple funding sources awarded by Politecnico di Torino, University College London (UKRI Arts and Humanities Council) and others. Views and opinions expressed in Inappropriable are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the supporters and funders. Neither Politecnico di Torino and University College London (UKRI Arts and Humanities Council) nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
TEAM
Giovanna Astolfo
Co-Investigator
Camillo Boano
Co-Investigator
Edoardo Ciuffreda
Research Assistant
Antonio Di Campli
Research Assistant
Alessandra Faccini
Research Assistant
Manuel Grimaldi
Research Assistant
Stefano Mastromarino
Research Assistant
Richard Lee Peragine
Research Assistant
Antonio Stopani
Co-Investigator
Inappropriable is a research, a collective investigation and a condition of possibility which sets out to interrogate practices of inhabitation, infrastructures of life, of marronage and fugitive worldling, focusing on labour ecologies in territories of migration: frontiers where bodies, spaces and labour are reconfigured through extractive and plantation-like capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion.