BORGO NARRATIONS
FROM THE LIVING ROOM
Live performance

In a collective performance students of Decolonizing Architecture reflect on the physical and non-physical experience of Borgo Rizza during the Difficult Heritage Summer School.

Decolonizing Architecture Advanced `Studies (DAAS) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm is a full-time research-based post-master. It uses the term decolonization as a critical position and conceptual frame for a research practice engaged in social and political struggles.

In September 2021 DAAS organised the Difficult Heritage Summer School 2021 at Borgo Rizza. The thoughts about the experience were presented at the Rundgång 2021 through a performance of collective writing inspired by an experiment guided by Hannah Clarkson, detached from the idea of individual authorship we converse in synergy with each other: collectively we imagined what the futures of this place might be. 

“Such as many other rural towns built in the 1940s under the fascist regime by the “Entity of Colonization of Sicily”, Borgo Rizza aimed to “reclaim” and “modernize” the south of Italy which was deemed “empty” and “backward”. This network of multiple 'borghi' conceived a form of internal colonization which shared many aims with the agenda of imperial colonization; to gain control of both the people and the landscape”