Post Disaster Works

The Unfinished Barricade is a temporary occupation of a monumental space through a series of spatial devices that aim to resignify the matter of collective memory by critically engaging with the architectural and political nature of the site. Although the most iconic symbol of local heritage, the St. Elmo fort carries the burden of the colonial processes that shaped territories and peoples of the Mediterranean over centuries of occupation and conflict.
The intervention occupies a residual space on the roof of the fort, a patch of waste land hidden behind a “parade” of war cannons. Rather than a closure, the barricade represents a scenographic device to trigger a critical confrontation with the place and its symbolic value. The open gap between the fence and the defensive wall is an invitation to get into the space and inhabit it.
The notion of “unfinished” refers to the inherent nature of the barricade, seen less as a static object and more as an “architecture of circulation” between places, people and ideologies, a space of coexistence in which the solidarities forged by communal effort expand toward a collective horizon.

Before being a military or spatial infrastructure, then, the barricade is an infrastructure for the socialization of counter-hegemonic processes, and is only complete when it is inhabited by the bodies and practices that are articulated around it.
Throughout the duration of the Biennale, this borderline space will host a series of actions: public conversations and performances that will generate hesitations in the normative functioning of the war museum, and will contribute to shape an alternative imaginary built in a collective and non-predetermined way.