16/09/2025
ENGLISH. ITALIAN
Article: publication
Journal and no.: Officina* Journal, 50
Manuel Grimaldi, Stefano Mastromarino, Richard Lee Peragine, Antonio Stopani, Camillo Boano
In recent years, new inhabitation spaces have emerged in Southern Italy’s rural areas, places defined as “informal ghettos”, deeply connected to the agri-food sector. Defined as a state of exception and ambiguity, informality is rather reconsidered as a practice of impossibility tapping into the context of the “informal ghetto of Borgo Mezzanone”. Located in the province of Foggia, the settlement is currently affected by “overcoming” projects supported by the PNRR’s substantial investments. Examining Borgo Mezzanone enables us to construct narratives and memories of refusal and resistance that escape the formal/informal dualism informing the PNRR project. Instead, it offers a glimpse of the possibility of another way of living. Through field research conducted from mid-2023 to the present, the action research investigates on the economic and social role of the ghetto, in sharp contrast to the emergency and objectifying perspectives on which the proposed institutional alternatives revolve.
Link to the article: Officina* Journal
Cite: Grimaldi, M., Mastromarino, S., Peragine, R. L., Stopani, A., & Boano, C. (2025). Project and the politics of overcoming. Building emergency in Borgo Mezzanone. Officina* Journal, 50, 50-59. https://doi.org/10.57623/2384-9029.2025.50.50-59
Keywords: PNRR, informality, Borgo Mezzanone
Period: September 2023-October 2025
Project: Camp Form(s); REFRAME
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.