AZIONI APRIPISTA (per lo spiazzamento)
02/03/2024
Project byLuigi Coppola
Curated by Alessandra Faccini
In collaboration with Camillo Boano, Edoardo Ciuffreda, Manuel Grimaldi, Stefano Mastromarino, Richard Lee Peragine, Antonio Stopani
Within the project “Inappropriable. Archiving fugitive infrastructures across frontier ecologies” (Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio - DIST, Politecnico di Torino, Università degli Studi di Torino)
Funded by “Reframing arrival: Transnational perspectives on perceptions, governance and practices - REFRAME” (Development Planning Unit UCL - UK AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council)
Azioni apripista (per lo spiazzamento) is a participatory public art intervention for the so-called ‘Pista di Borgo Mezzanone’ (Manfredonia, Foggia). Conceived by the artist and agroecologist Luigi Coppola, and developed together with the Inappropriable team, the project consists in the creation of tree-lined squares: places of gathering, shade and shelter for the inhabitants of the settlement and the extended community that crosses it, which will be developed starting from the planting of trees and plants in the three identified junction areas (the first, near the Nigerian Protestant church; the second, near the Ghanaian mosque; the third, in the area temporarily named ‘Piazza Guinea’).
Fast-growing ‘allochthonous’ species have been selected, such as Ficus australis, Melia azedarach, or Jacaranda mimosifolia, together with their ability to regenerate ecosystems - contributing to soil fertilisation and the production, in a short time, of shade and oxygen - embody the promise of resistence of the Pista beyond the PNRR's plans for so-called ‘informal settlements’, thus rethinking its future.
Following an approach that combines ecosystem design with arts imaginative potential, the process consists of several stages identification of the planting areas, preceded by moments of dialogue, exchange and evaluation together with some inhabitants of the Pista, particularly those who live close to the areas in question; collective cleaning of the identified areas and preparation of the ground; planting operations; observation, maintenance and activation of the sites through workshop moments dedicated to, among others, the construction of shading and water recirculation, adopting strategies of sharing, recovery and circularity.
Each of these phases, from conception to design, from realisation to survival, up to the dissemination of the project, is possible first and foremost thanks to the work and constant mediation of the network of associations, volunteers, collectives and solidarity groups that work daily in Pista alongside the inhabitants, taking an active part in the ecology of the place. The Azioni apripista are intended as a strategy to confront and problematise conventional representations, media and otherwise, of informal settlements and the subjectivities, often with a migration background, that reside there. A symbolic gesture that lends itself to improving the conditions of habitability of the Pista, destined to transform itself organically, taking on new guises and contributing to generating new forms of relationality in and with the place.
Through a series of minimal interventions, such as the collection of waste and the creation of communal shadow zones, the Azioni apripista intend to deconstruct established postures which, when faced with the distortions and paradoxes of a predatory and extractive capitalist system, most often end up in prescriptive, essentialising or, even worse, destructive terms, to leave room instead for open, multiform, disorienting narratives. The term ‘spiazzamento’ – translatable as the intersection between ‘displacement’ and ‘disorientment’ – plays precisely on this ambiguity: on the one hand, the feeling of disorientation in approaching, both physically and figuratively, an inappropriate place like Pista, where the absence of trees, in and around it, is a clear indicator of a strategic inefficiency perpetrated by local and state policies; on the other hand, the desire to cleanse the field of hypostatised visions, effectively inaugurating, through planting, a trajectory of engagement and exploration, a signal at once of struggle and pacification.
Luigi Coppola is an artist, agroecologist and promoter of participatory public art projects. His artistic practice is united by an innovative relationship to the commons through actions capable of activating collective potentials and imaginaries. Currently senior researcher at the Center for Arts Design and Social Research of Boston (USA), he has been a coactivator of the movement linked to Casa delle Agriculture in Castiglione d'Otranto (Lecce) since 2013. The transformative action passes through detritus, waste and abandonment: Coppola works on the margins confronting both the inveterate extraction of resources and people and the intensive exploitation of territories. The artist's work unfolds through performances, pictorial works, symbolic actions, environmental and social sculptures, but the centre of gravity of his practice often shifts towards overcoming the codified norms of institutional artistic venues: the artist's authorship takes on less importance in favour of the unfolding of the collective body and the temporality of the work that becomes extended. Coppola has developed public art projects, performances and exhibitions in various international contexts such as 7th Lubumbaschi Biennale (DR Congo), 2022; 5th Istanbul Design Biennale, 2020; Matera Capitale Cultura 2019; Fondazione Merz Torino, 2018; BAK Utrecht, 2018; Kunsthaus Graz, 2017; Quadriennale Roma, 2017.
Next intervention
Author: Alessandra Faccini
Keywords: Public art; Participatory Intervention; Displacement; Disorientment; Tree-lined squares
Period: September 2024 - 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.