AereoBorgo
17/05/2025
Project byLa Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros
Curated by La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros
In collaboration with Rossella Altobelli, Camillo Boano, Manuel Grimaldi, Frédérique Gélinas, Stefano Mastromarino, Richard Lee Peragine, Antonio Stopani
Within the project “Inappropriable. Archiving fugitive infrastructures across frontier ecologies”
Funded by“Reframing arrival: Transnational perspectives on perceptions, governance and practices - REFRAME” (Development Planning Unit UCL - UK AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council) and “Al di là del campo. Indagare opacità, forme e visioni del superamento come logica territoriale - CAMP-FORMS” (Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio - DIST, Politecnico di Torino, Università degli Studi di Torino)
Between May 11th and 21st, 2025, Inappropriable team organized a ten-day experiment in Borgo Mezzanone, Italy. As part of this initiative, the artist and architect collective La Escuela Nunca, based in Chile and Argentina, has been invited to join us in exploring the complex spatial and social dynamics of the area.
Located on the remains of the NATO military airstrip once active during the Kosovo war, the Pista di Borgo Mezzanone today hosts a large population composed mainly of migrant agricultural workers living in self-built dwellings. Confronted with the ruined heritage and the multiple presents of Borgo, the collective proposed a provocative intervention: building a plane.
Drawing inspiration from the site's fractured history, La Escuela Nunca asked how life amidst the remnants of war infrastructure shapes the imaginations and everyday practices of those who inhabit it today. To explore this, the collective embedded themselves in the makeshift economies of the settlement, negotiating use and access to both materials and knowledge through interactions with residents and traders.
Scavenging and repurposing items such as iron frames, barrels, pipes, ropes, fans, and even Christmas decorations - gifted or bought around the streets of Borgo - they began constructing the aircraft on Thursday the 15th of May. The plane, a symbolic and material assemblage of Borgo’s lived realities, is aimed to roll through the old airstrip’s streets, reactivating its militarized past through the creative agency of those now shaping its future.
La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros is a project to investigate new forms of collective learning, a platform for self-education to imagine other ways of life. La Escuela Nunca aims to investigate the critical powers of the project, as a weapon for the questioning of current states of affairs, and the imagination of affective alternatives for a world in crisis. It takes the form of an experimental community, for the self-management of collective learning through speculation about the future through ourselves. The school operates through appearances, each in different contexts and with different arrangements of participants, guests, activities and themes, provocative to its context of appearance.
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Author: Stefano Mastromarino
Keywords: Public art; Participatory Intervention; Airplane; War ruins
Period: May 2025 - ongoing
Place: Borgo Mezzanone
Project: Camp Form(s); REFRAME.
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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.