Ruins

To whom belongs the land that is brought to fruition? 

Who has the right to move?

Who has the right to settle? 

Where does the objective arise to contain relationships in a bounded space? 

Where does it end?

Who is excluded?

Who is included

What is a territory? 

What is a border?

Where is the place of that territory if not in the relations it aims to contain?

Since a few years now the mobile settlement of migrant workers from Africa on the Northern Mediterranean shores has started to catch people’s attention in more lasting fashion. Week upon week, year upon year, the drama of constant migrant deaths on the coastlines is haunting public consciousness. 

At the same time, a Black Mediterranean borderland is slowly solidifying in the Southern parts of the Italian peninsula under the form of a steady sedimentation process, of the land, of the people, and of the traces of their mutual relationship. More particularly on the Basilicata-Puglia boundary, a new diasporic community has emerged in this interzone, which embodies this proceeding transformation of rural society on both ends of the Mediterranean waters: on the one end, an agrarian economy captured in an expanding global agro-food industry; on the other, a rapid desertification process driven by human and institutional abandonment. But hese times are also characterized a different kind of spatial segregation, a new kind of geographic map, in which nation-state borders and sovereignty appear to be persistently shaken up by global events.

We invite you to consider this map fundamentally as a meeting place: a 'marginal' platform that represents the transformation of these times but at the same time gives rise to a new sense of place and territory.