Displacement – New Town No Town
October 2016
MACRO -Museum of Contemporary Art Rome
Fotografia – Festival Internazionale di Roma
In this exhibition, for the project DISPLACEMENT, we combine narrative and photography, a dialogue between two different ways of seeing that do not want to become overly explicative of each other.
DISPLACEMENT is a journey through the cities that in Italy and in Europe are reshaping their centres and suburbs, changing the dynamics of their social and cultural life and shifting the places of the individual and collective memories.
This displacement has happened, very visibly, in the town of L’Aquila, where reconstruction politics has disregarded the social fabric and urban connectivity, and the culture and history of its communities.
After the earthquake of April 6th 2009, more than 65,000 people have been relocated to hastily built suburban settlements. So, L’Aquila is now a town of boutique hotels resurrected from the dusty debris, of empty streets dotted with new houses for sale, while its own population lives scattered in the surrounding New Towns. The centres of these dormitory suburbs are nothing else but the roundabouts of shopping malls. Here, like in many other peripheries around the world, we can immediately perceive the physical and mental displacement, the material and spiritual disorientation.
L’Aquila is the starting point of a journey that in images and in words will encompass our new visible cities: Souvenir cities, Amusement cities, Shopping Mall cities, Grand Hotel cities.
A journey into a displacement that has just begun.
