"periferìa s. f. [from Late Latin peripherīa “circumference”, Gr. περιϕέρεια, d. of περιϕέρω “to carry around, to turn”]. - 1. non-com. Contour, edge, circular rim; 2. ext. a. The extreme and most marginal part, as opposed to the centre, of a physical space or of a more or less extensive territory; b. In particular, and in more common usage, the whole of the districts of a city farthest from the centre; c. With reference to the human body, or to a living organism in general, even a vegetable one, the superficial part, closest to the outside’.
The Rhizome City
In common language and thought, ‘periphery’ is synonymous with a space on edge, experienced and observed negatively as a reflection and juxtaposition of the center. This dichotomous vision typical of the modern era has roots in the history of metropolises and in the architectural determinism that shaped the city suburbs, orienting the aesthetics and behavior of these living places. The periphery is, therefore, a manufactured prejudice.
In 1963, the film Le mani sulla città (The Hands on the City) by Francesco Rosi made manifest the building speculation orchestrated by the central political powers to the detriment of the housing of the working classes, setting a phenomenon of national dimensions in Naples, a city usurped by the stereotypical periphery in Italian geography. In Rome, power deployment over the city is tangible in the historical-architectural stratification and housing redistribution, under the pressure of a centrifugal force that sees the center, the show-off city, in expansion and deserted, while life flows into the liminal zones. Like a skin on which stimuli are localized and propagated, the peripheries are organs of reception and symptomatic perception of deeper processes running through the city. Thus Rome is configured as a rhizome-city, a living entity endowed with a plural number of self representative nuclei, centers of life, of resistance, of cultural, social, and political ferment.
The Lands of Lions
The RIF - Museo delle Periferie di Roma (Museum of the Suburbs of Rome) explores these intersections, researching ‘on the geographic and social margins’ of the city and analyzing the phenomenon of urban peripheries on a global and local scale. Spread throughout the territory through associations and city networks, the RIF is currently a content generator without a ‘container’, waiting for a location planned for 2025 in the Tor Bella Monaca district where it will be the first Museum of Rome outside the Grande Raccordo Anulare - in the ‘other side’ of the city.
Among the best-known events promoted by RIF to make its activities tangible - in the words of Giorgio de Finis, anthropologist and director of the project - is IPER Festival of Peripheries, a catalyst for meetings and plural narratives through the integrated relationship of artistic and anthropological practices as tools for interpreting contemporary society. The Festival takes place in the ex-Mattatoio of Rome, a cultural pole in the heart of Testaccio district, whose history is linked to industry and working-class communities and which today is an emblematic place of a city that is changing and expanding its center, between urban
regeneration and gentrification processes.
During the week of the Festival, the venue is given to meetings, lectures, participatory performances, and artistic interventions that generate questions about the current political and cultural context, incorporating hypotheses and contradictions: can art be a tool for fighting social inequalities? What positioning and what narrative to adopt? Is there a free space where to give asylum to ‘our residual divergent imaginaries’?
Hic Sunt Leones. Where the Imagination Dwells, the title of the 2024 edition, appropriates the language of ancient cartographies as practices of mapping knowledge and coloniality that identified as ‘lions’ lands’ those places still unknown to human beings, to restore a concept of the periphery with a wide resonance, explored as a condition of being in the process of becoming, a space of the imagination beyond the physical dimension and disciplinary definitions.
Counterintuitive Ethnographies
Reflecting on the power of the gaze and the mechanisms of ‘anesthetization’ of reality perpetrated by visual culture, the installation Divertissment L'Altrove è Qui triggers a game of denunciation of contemporary distraction through a counter-intuitive approach: a Wunderkammer full of objects of multiple derivations, including birds released from cages and fixed in front of a television set, transports the visitor into the dimension of global, totalizing observation, which prevents focusing on the incumbency of a puppet lying in the center of the room, the dead body of a shipwrecked migrant. The project is curated by Professor Vincenzo Padiglione and the students of the School of Specialisation in Demo Ethno Anthropological Heritage at La Sapienza in Rome.
Resonating with ethnographic fieldwork, Valentina De Santis' artistic practice emerges with the project Roma Ghetto Chic, exhibited in the spaces of La CAVe Cantieri delle Arti Visive. The series of black and white photographs proposes an alternative mapping of the city and its ‘works’ to the classical and tourist topography. The vision of Rome's suburbs passes through the skin of the people who inhabit it, in a photographic continuum that captures and enhances the details of tattooed bodies, as new indelible and living landmarks of the urban fabric.
Living the Alternatives
The dialogue between disciplines and the alternative possibilities of living, is explored by The Sanctuary City Project, curated by Sergio De La Torre and Chris Treggiari. The project took place in the spaces of MAAM - Museo dell'Altro e dell'Altrove (Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere), a reality originated from the occupation of a former factory that has become a place of hospitality, integration, and urban regeneration through practices that have involved artists and local inhabitants, under the aegis of RIF. Arriving for the first time in Italy through the mediation of the Female Cut Italia Association and curator Claudia Pecoraro, The Sanctuary City Project included silk-screen printing workshops for the local inhabitants, a daily video podcast where immigration policies and personal experiences were debated, and a mural intervention by artist Cinta Arribas.
Similarly, Valeria Sanguini's IperTenda installation bears witness to the complex relationship between art, anthropology, and reality. It has been conceived by the artist as a ‘circular storyboard’ and nomadic device born in 2011 in Berlin, where it paraded in the streets joining a demonstration. Later it was brought to Riace as a symbol of welcome and bond between the inhabitants, and finally activated at MAAM in 2016, where it has become an integral part of the house-city-museum.
For the Festival, the Tenda is installed in one of the rooms of the Mattatoio and hosts meetings, performances, and participatory works, acting as a ‘lens of knowledge’. The opening intervention has been dedicated to Ode, a homeless boy who arrived in Italy through a long journey from Nigeria via Libya. His travel story, called Along the Line, tells about his arrival in Italy and the everyday life of a precarious existence: in Rome, he collects leaves and rubbish along the streets, taking care of the living spaces of a neighborhood where, by oxymoron, his presence is sometimes invisible. Placed at the center of and in connection with the Tenda device, her narrative becomes an element of rupture into the representative spaces of art entered by the crude reality of living on the edge.
The convergence of art and anthropology applied to contexts of social fragility exemplifies the inseparability of the relationship between these disciplines in approaching reality, while simultaneously requiring a continuous renegotiation of reciprocal positions and gazes between interlocutors and researchers, artists, and art subjects. Without providing definitive answers or solutions, IPER and more broadly the RIF-Museo delle Periferie di Roma are experimental spaces for exploring and experiencing a syncretism of the arts and disciplines through which to investigate possible imaginaries while remaining firmly anchored in the present of our world.