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.

EP04 is an account of PDR practice so far, as well as a collective reflection on the concept of post-disaster.
Within the continuous shuffling of evolutionary processes, the stubborn idea of a linear and unidirectional progress is an act of individual conceit. Inhabiting the post-disaster implies placing oneself in clear opposition to the Western 2050 narrative that pushes the “point of catastrophe” forward – to some technocratically predetermined future moment. The disaster has already happened (have we survived? What have we learned?) and the Mediterranean is a crack. Matter squints, scrambles, a flow (of different bodies, resources and times) where the future collapses into the present. Places like Taranto are outposts of the global crisis, space-time interstices, haunted geographies/landscapes where new unlikely symbioses are negotiated. Out of the ruins of the present fragile yet explosive formations emerge, unfolding new spatial and social relationships where we are all in solidarity, interrelated and self-determined. They are figuring out a solution. We are already imagining new ways, new worlds.

We are speaking to you from the future.