Stefano Mastromarino
Research Assistant (The Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit, UCL)
Biography
Stefano Mastromarino is an architect, refugee support worker and PhD candidate at The Bartlett DPU, UCL, funded by an ESRC UBEL studentship. A former research assistant at the Ipraus Lab in Paris for the development of the platform “Architecture et précarités”, he worked and studied Architecture at Politecnico di Torino, ENSA Paris-Belleville and TU Dortmund. Stefano is currently involved in the Arts and Humanities Council-funded research “Reframing arrival infrastructure” as a research assistant. Besides academia, he has been involved in different forms of migrant support and activism in France, Italy and the UK and has been working as a UASC Support Worker for a non-profit organisation providing housing and aid services to young people seeking asylum in the UK.
Research interests
Stefano’s research interests are shaped by his positionality as a researcher, architect and refugee support worker, merging anthropological discourses of migrants' incarceration and care into situated spatial practice. By looking at carceral landscapes of violence through different territories of migration in Europe, Stefano is currently pursuing an exploration of people on the move’s refuge-making practice. He questions how the infrastructure of migrants’ suspension is de/territorialised, between institutions and people’s strategies to resist, through various forms of carceral, humanitarian, makeshift refuge-making practices that shape the architecture of migration in Italy. He builds on the ‘refuge’ as a multiple figure to define the political and normative condition through which people are forced to build ways of inhabiting in the absence of a place to call home, through fugitiveness from the racial oppression they endure. Inspired by previous research in so-called makeshift camps and squats between Greater Paris and the French-Italian border, Stefano is currently focusing on the contexts of the Italian-Slovenian border and the province of Foggia.
Selected publications
Mastromarino, S. (Forthcoming in 2024) ‘Beyond shelter. Makeshift inhabitation in displacement in Greater Paris’ in Displacement Urbanism. Politics of bodies and spaces of abandonment and endurance, ed. Astolfo, G. and Boano C., Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2024) ‘Inhabiting through interstitial opacity Protective negotiations of suspended existence across Paris’ liminalities’, lo Squaderno, (67), pp. 35–38.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2023) ‘Makeshift borders in Porte de la Chapelle. Strategies of imperfect weak inhabitation across Paris’ Boulevard Périphérique’, UOU scientific journal, 5, pp. 124-137.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2023) ‘Vallée de la Roya and its opaque infrastructures of transit. Inhabiting the border.’, field:, 9(1), pp. 47-63.
Mastromarino, S. (Forthcoming in 2024) ‘Beyond shelter. Makeshift inhabitation in displacement in Greater Paris’ in Displacement Urbanism. Politics of bodies and spaces of abandonment and endurance, ed. Astolfo, G. and Boano C., Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2024) ‘Inhabiting through interstitial opacity Protective negotiations of suspended existence across Paris’ liminalities’, lo Squaderno, (67), pp. 35–38.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2023) ‘Makeshift borders in Porte de la Chapelle. Strategies of imperfect weak inhabitation across Paris’ Boulevard Périphérique’, UOU scientific journal, 5, pp. 124-137.
Mastromarino, S. and Boano, C. (2023) ‘Vallée de la Roya and its opaque infrastructures of transit. Inhabiting the border.’, field:, 9(1), pp. 47-63.
Contacts: stefano.mastromarino.23@ucl.ac.uk
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.