Post Disaster Works

Post Disaster Rooftops is a critical spatial practice staged on the rooftops of Taranto, an industrial city in Southern Italy which is undergoing a long-term ecological and economic crisis. The project understands the city as a manifesto of the western contradictions, whose condition is a starting point for an intersectional and collective investigation on urgent contemporary issues.

EP05’s represents a turning point, a greater, more extensive effort of co-imagination, from the island, beyond the island, towards the neglected spaces of modernist voracity, towards port infrastructures and lagoon ecologies. Together, we cross these territories and observe them through the lens of the marsh: a monstrous yet generative, counter-anthropocentric space, where the hierarchical relationships between humans and others are inverted, subverted.

Two movements, like mirrored parts of a multi-voiced symphony that spreads between the land and the sea:

First Movement: LAGOON. The marsh is transition, the ever-changing border space where the living and the dead, the under and the over, the miasmas and the blooms mix. It belongs to neither world, yet it is all worlds together: amphibious existences swarm in the marsh, humid and promiscuous relationships are consumed. The marsh is infested, having absorbed the toxic legacy of capitalist water-sucking violence.

Second Movement: CITY. The swamp is a metaphor for everything that has gone its own way and not as it should have. It is in counter-monumental architecture—or rather, in the scrap, the residue of the monumental. You have to observe it under a microscope to understand its complexity, to un-accustom the eye to the scale of progress. The swamp arose, despite ourselves or fortunately for us, where we imagined setting the dream—now shattered—of modernity.