DIFF-USE by ATIsuffix

DIFF ROMA WORKSHOP 2015 - 2016

COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF IDEAS PROGRAM COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF IDEAS PROGRAM, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, Comparative History of Ideas, (CHID), is an interdisciplinary program that examines the interplay of ideas and their cultural, historical, and political contexts. The Program in the Comparative History of Ideas is widely recognized and respected for its innovative and transformative international programs. We believe that a “foreign” experience should be a part of every liberal education as a path toward critical participation in a world that is both increasingly unified and persistently diverse. www.chid.washington.edu

PROGRAM COORDINATORS Erin Clowes, Master of Arts, International Studies, Lecturer and International Program Director, Comparative History of Ideas Program University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Adriana Goni Mazzitelli, Cultural Anthropologist, PhD in Urban Studies and Planning, Lecturer and researcher in the Civic Art Laboratory, Universitá degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy.

LABORATORY OF CIVIC ART, UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI ROMA TRE. In a season marked by public art projects spreading around the world, LAC acts as a multidisciplinary research group with a particular interest on elaborating, together with social groups and local communities, a collective and shared vision over urban space, through the means of ‘Civic Arts’. LAC considers any intervention in the public realm as an opportunity for social transformation and operates as a device for a civic renaissance. www.articivche.net

PROGRAM TEAM Laboratory of Civic Art - Ati Suffix, Matteo Locci, Natalia Agati, Panagiotis Samsarelos, Emanuele Caporrella, Maria Rocco, Emanuela di Felice, Davide Cicolani

PROFESSORS Marco Brazzoduro, Universitá La Sapienza di Roma, Adriana Goni Mazzitelli , Laboratorio Arti Civiche, Universitá degli Studi Roma Tre.

GRAPHICS AND LAYOUTS ati suffix PHOTOGRAPHERS Emanuele Caporrella, Natalia Agati, Rosa Jijon

DIFFUSE MARKET 2016 Alyssa Denee’ Adwell Alexis Christine Alverson Roberta Miller Blood Michelle Nalani Blumenkrantz Kylee Nicole Brown Hang Thanh Bui Alley Nicole Calkins Colton Victor Campbell Annalise Elizabeth Castner Martin Lewis Creed Kaia Bryn D’Albora Zoe Ray Davis Deenpreet Dhaliwal Halle Jordan Friedland Elizabeth Hartmann Chuhan Hou Samantha Claire Murphy Sara Ruth Pinto Mackenzie Adam Thomas Bradley Jon Usselman Orianne Simha Varsha Haoqun Wang Katharine Grace Wensley Katrina Clements

INDEX Foreword. Erin Clowes.................................................................................. ........4 The Roma in Rome, Challenging Apartheid Francesco Careri................................................................................. 6 Waste ghost, the recycle Roma markets. Adriana Goni Mazzitelli................................................................... 8 A/Objects, the asymptotic encounter of casts out Matteo Locci..................................................................................... 12 Decorum and Crime Ati suffix............................................................................................. 15 DIFFUSE Ati suffix............................................................................................. 18 DIFFUSE .............................................................................................................. 22 GIFT CARDS nuovi mercati diffusi..................................................................... 25

FOREWORD ERIN CLOWES WHY A PROGRAM ON ROMA PEOPLE IN EUROPE AND IN ROME?

While directing previous international programs at the University of Washington’s Rome Center in Rome, it troubled me that students uncritically absorbed the overt racism against Roma people common among the local Italian population. The conversations initiated around the topic became the framework for this experiential, quarter-long course investigating the social and economic mechanisms leading to this extreme level of marginalization and interrogating some of the methods individuals and groups use to generate and interpret knowledge about themselves and about others. We examine what it means to say “we”, and how the circle of the “we” is implicitly or explicitly exclusionary. The ultimate aim of our work together is to learn to think critically about how we think, and how to understand our actions as purposeful and ethical in the world. In addition to the academic work, it was important that students also directly connect with Roma communities. This led me to a wonderful collaboration team.

THE ROMA IN ROME, CHALLENGING APARTHEID

FRANCESCO CARERI

n Italy there is a creeping apartheid. While 90,000 Roma people live in houses, for the other 35,000 there is a city apart. For many years these Roma populations lived in the citieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s margins, building their communities in abandoned spaces, but in recent years the municipality prepares for those Roma and Sinti people that have been living in camps for decades, new encampments with high densities

of emergency structures, remote from primary services, controlled by armed guards and closed circuit cameras, with curfews and mandatory identification photocards and bar codes, and perimeter fences erected around the communities, like a prison. We have produced a considerable literature concerning temporary zones where excess humanity lives (Rahola: 2003), spaces which open when the state of exception becomes the rule (in Agamben: 1995), suspended areas (Breasts: 2007) in a kind of frozen transitory zone that produce dependency syndromes and lives that become dependent on transfusion (Agier: 2002), supported by vacant and undesireable city land, (Boano & Floris: 2005) inhabited by citizens without citizenship rights and therefore without the city, or rather a city apart, separate, forced into margins selected just for them. In Italy those spaces were born as nomad camps - officially â&#x20AC;&#x153;temporary campsâ&#x20AC;? - and are regulated institutions. In the absence of a national legislative framework, regional laws were enacted in the nineties, a sort of an equipped parking imagined for wandering communities which were primarily Italian Roma in the 1980s. These spaces became perennially temporary settlements for the Roma fleeing the wars in the Balkans and then from depressed areas of Romania. They evolved from the slums of shacks and caravans in the fields of containers to the current villages, with a growing state surveil-

lance and dependence on institutions and a consequent loss of decision-making autonomy over their own lives and occupations. Even the history of Roma living in Italy has a long literature, it is the history of urban contempt (Brunello: 1996), which for centuries has driven them out of our cities, making them nomads by force (Wiernicki: 1997), foreigners everywhere (Brazzoduro & Candreva: 2009), the people of the landfills (Piasere: 1991), children of the ghetto (Sigona: 2002). What we are witnessing since 2008 with the commissioner of the “Roma issue”, is the Italian government taking extraordinary measures by declaring a “state of emergency in relation to nomad settlements in the territory of Campania, Lazio and Lombardy” (extended and currently extended to regions of Veneto and Piedmont). Additionally, the prefects of Naples, Rome and Milan were appointed by the Minister of the Interior Giuliano Amato “Commissioners Delegates for the realization of all actions necessary to overcome the state of emergency”. A further shift from old policies of marginalization in the slums to the institutionalization of the Roma ghettos as real places of ethnic concentration. The case of Rome, where the new system of apartheid is fully institutionalized, combines planning with many speculative interests. The Nomads Plan of the City of Rome permits just 6000 Roma people to be in the city and was focused on the dismantling of illegal camps. The strategy was reducing the number of admissions and the concentration of displaced people in the villages, where the living conditions are often below minimum housing standards set by law, and even to those used

by the Civil Protection for disasters like floods and earthquakes. If they would have invested all these economic resources in public construction, the funds spent on the Nomad Plan, would have resulted in more than 8000 Roma having access to live in public housing.

WASTE GHOSTS, THE RECYCLE ROMA MARKETS.

THE FUTURE OF AN INCRISING WORLDWIDE INFORMAL URBAN ECONOMY ADRIANA GONI MAZZITELLI

elling the stories of those who search for hope into the world dumpster isn’t quite an easy task. Nowadays millions of people, men and women with no future who have left their countryside or inhospitable villages, find their only trustful income within the lure of finding luck in the fast growing world metropolis and adopt an hopefully “normal” life condition. World consumption increase has created an enormous imbalance in the management of municipal waste: as noted by Wolfgang Sachs, the production generates wealth as well as waste and with the wealth production globalization is also increasing the production of waste, therefore real “city dumps” Arose: the African ones such as the Korogocho slum in Nairobi - often described by father Zanotelli - or the lesser known Kigali in Rwanda; but also in Zambia, where 90 per cent of trash is not collected and it accumulated in the streets, while the landfill Olososua, Nigeria, welcomes every day more than a thousand trucks of waste. The Manila one, in Asia, it is the infamous Payatas in Quezon City, a slum where over 25,000 people live: it is built on a hillside of waste, the “smoking mountain” where adults and children vie old materials for resale. But there is also the Paradise Village, which is not a resort, but a slum grew over a swamp where floods are as regular as the monsoon rains. And then there is the “dumpsite Catmon”, the landfill on which it has been developed a slum

overhanging Paradise Village. In China, in Beijing, dumps are inhabited by thousands of people whose recycle illegal waste, while Indian slums are the most densely populated by the “survivors of waste”. Yet something is changing. In some cases, the garbage has generated social emancipation: in Cairo, Egypt, the informal sector workers - known as Zabbaleen - collect one-third of the city’s household waste, nearly one million tons per year, and recycle and allocate more than 80 percent of the cropt to compost. One of the its districts, Mokattam, has become the home of 700 small businesses for waste collection. In Brazil, where the open dumps are excluded from tourists’ areas to be concentrated in metropolitan suburbs, there is the experience of ‘Catadores do lixo’: a social movement organized in cooperatives which today employ thousands of people in the collection, recycling and in the waste disposal. The first cooperative, the Coopamare dates back to 1989 and troughout the years the experience moved from the initial one in San Paolo, to Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte and in Rio Grande do Sul. In Buenos Aires, in Argentina, the “cartoneros” engaged in thr unofficial collection of waste has been pioneers of recycling for several years: their cooperatives collect more than 20,000 workers in recent years and have been called to participate in the “zero waste “ campaign, an ambitious government project to reach the objective

wodden canopy

0€ great to store goods aluminium wall Roma are no longer allowed to store and sell metal by weight. since then the House gets it al

0€

marble deck

0€perfect fixing surface

In and around the house is where the objects are accumulated or transformed throughout the week

natural lawn 0€living next to the higway has its pros

of recycling all municipal solid waste by 2020. Also in Europe, the phenomenon does not stop, where it’s up to the last social group in the pyramid to develop their informal recycle strategy: namely the most discriminated among the ethnic groups , the Rome. Considering their complete formal work market marginalization, the informal recycling sector is the only source of income for their households. Nevertheless Italy doesn’t accept the current existence of extreme poverty within its soil, like the one that lives on society’ leftovers. It’s a matter of principles for local Politicians that are still too shortsighted to understand that informal strategies need to be strengthen instead of being persecuted , which only lead to illegality and precariousness. In Rome, the city in which together with the Laboratory of the Civic Arts of University of Rome Three, we are committed to support these segregated urban community, there have been many ghost experiences. Over the years there have been many used markets’ tryouts, proposals for reuse and recycling cooperatives, including the trace of the used objects’ chain, or throughout local cooperatives which collected directly from the houses and shops that, through an agreement, would give a second chance to discarded objects, all within a framework of legality and care for the environment. During the 2016 workshop the students committed with the Roma activist and craftsmen to investigate with the artist collective Ati suffix the possibility of building alternative forms of marketing for products that originate in the chain of waste. We asked students to find alternatives routes to support the activities of subsistence

of the Roma families which always suffer the persecution the municipal police. The proposed task was to advertise an online market throughout the collaboration of downtown regular shops. Once the impossibility of selling their products on the street is certified, it’s time to experiment virtual market as well as any other alternation of the usual market format. The results were above expectations; considering that the tryout has been the first foray into the city “formal”, we found traders excited to contribute, and the items, thanks to the students’ care and transformation reached the second life into the shop’s showcases. they were then displayed in the windows of one of the most important historical centers of the world, that of the city of Rome. There is still much to do but thanks to the enthusiasm of the young Roma activists and the unprejudiced acceptance by retailers has confirmed the importance of launching projects aimed at dialogue and towards the construction of new opportunities, beyond the rigid box of institutional prejudices. It is not easy to live depending on what society discards, but the waste picker’s faces demand to be recognized as working class men and women in order to get the same rights as those dedicated to other trades. For many of them the dignity, despite living in the trash, never lacked, nevertheless is still waiting to be recognized and valued.

currently

2500 micro enterprises

searched 1600 ondumpsters a dayly basis

33.000.000â&#x201A;Ź

the estimated garbage reservesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; value

Difficult life for over 10.000 Roma living in rome deprived of any professional recognition

A OBJECTS

the asymptotic encounter of casts out MATTEO LOCCI

Roma communities are politically excluded, segregated and confined in a position conceived to prevent them to mix with the others. The symbolic fear of contamination as well as the psychosis of safety demands for a Roma isolation. Thus the entrepreneurship behind the reuse Market creates a double level of discomfort for the bourgeoisie. Objects and people once thought to be excluded inevitably reappears in the urban sphere creating new temporary thresholds of emancipation. Nevertheless this process is highly uncanny for a society that decided to exclude what now reappears that often leads to a strong cognitive dissonance, an outright rejection to the a/object, as one would rather reject than rationalize. Indeed the a/objects are familiar, yet incongruous, because they disturb the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by them. Why is it interesting considering that after all the a/objects are nothing more than useless discards? What is exactly being sold in the Reuse markets? While some of the a/objects sold in the markets might seem anachronistic and obsolete, their nature is intertwined with contemporary dynamics which makes them more actual than their look. Sometimes ugly, other odd

looking, these a/objects are usually old, used, often ruined and most likely useless, nevertheless they serve the extraordinary, yet unwelcomed, duty of mirroring our society. Despite the fact that they hardly have any functional nor decorative purpose, their presence is the final stage where society is represented and perceives itself as surplus producers, the a/objects are, as such, the â&#x20AC;&#x153;us that are not us.â&#x20AC;? An a/object is therefore uncanny in that the observer can recognize something within it possibly of what it was before it was cast out, yet be repulsed by what it is that made it cast out to begin with. It does not have any practical value. It exist only It because it signifies something else; the a/object becomes a perceivable reference to the marginality it entails. It is a-structural , as it is constantly denying and pushing society and also because it is obviously denied by the superstructure. The a/object does not aim at coherent criticisms, as It sits in a very unstable position where the ambiguous use value denial is being resold, but with its unintentional mirroring function it constitutes the most ambitious form of emancipatory doubt.

Every family member goes to the weekend market.

the average weekly income from the reused market is

30-50 â&#x201A;Ź

6pmgoodsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; loading7 pmdeparture9pm pm arrival on market site 10pm array of goods10pmto6am sleeping and selling6amto12am pure selling12am reversed load13amreturn at destination.

DECORUM AND CRIME

ATI SUFFIX

Diffuse is part of an ongoing research called “Dellitto e Decoro” that explores the political removal of social thresholds that allow for interclasses encounters. As Freud considered, our psyche protects itself from the uncanny by removing any elements perturbing of state of normality. Very similar to that, the Italian psychosis of “decoro urbano” is generated by nothing more than the fear of the uncanny as it points at removing any object capable of opening a problematic threshold. As in psychology, urban removal characterizes any form of urban cleansing aiming at eliminating the very few places of interactions left with Roma and social outcasts; Dumpsters, Shaks, Trashcans, Markets and alike share the nightmare of being removed from the urban scene in order to deny the right to the city for all. The marginal, the exceptional and any expression of non-inte-

gration can occur as long as thresholds are kept. Delitto e Decoro stands against any form of removal disguised by policy. In a shameless country proud of its own racism, reality is socially manipulated according to the needs of those who control the symbolical power. Therefore any form of counter desecration to generate conscious pollution of the current mystification is welcome. Throughout multiple and heterogeneous street interventions and community based projects Delitto e Decore psychoanalyze civic behavior by putting it into stress. In account to the project’s process, this booklet presents different modalities of civic engagement with the issue of informal Roma recycling industry developed within the last years; Trashure campaign, Pink dumpster and the most recent Diffuse.

DIFF ATI SUFFIX

THE ROMA REUSE INDUSTRY

THE SYSTEMATIC CLOSURE OF ROMA MARKETS

THE NEW DIFFUSE MARKETS

For years a quiet and industrious army o waste pickers come into possession of an enormous amount of trowned away objects In ordert to transform the waste into reusable products. Despite the virtuosity of the industry, this hidden workers are unwelcomed as the objects they collect represent an uncanny overproduction removed and unwanted by society.

After a decade of good practices of regularization of the reuse markets, the recollection of ferrous and bulk waste is likely to be sent into oblivion. Nowadays sales places and vending possibilities of the Roma community are phased out based on securitarian policies in the name of urban respectability.

The re-use activities made by the Roma Community reach such proportions that can hardly be hidden for long. It’s time to find new forms of products’ distribution for those withdrawn from markets, towards the recocgnition of their value within our society; namely the role overproduction that has the potential to make the system idle. For this reason diffuse aims at full recognition of production surplus, idle work and the object’s futility, declined use or obsolescence.

1-5 â&#x201A;Ź

each

A market for all. Thousands of Roma families works in the reuse industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALL ARTICLES

Agamben G., a) Homo sacer. Il potere soverano e la vita nuta. Ed. Einudi, Torino, 2005. Agier,M., Gèrer les indésirables. Des camps de réfugiés au governement humanitaire, Flammarion, Paris, 2008.

Baudrillard J., The system of objects (1968 ), Verso 2005

Brazzoduro A., Candreva G.,(a cura di): Stranieri Ovunque. Kalè, Manouches, Rom, Romanichals, Sinti… Zapruder. Rivista di storia della conflittualità sociale, n° 19, Italia, 2009. Brunello P. (a cura di), L’urbanistica del disprezzo. Campi rom e società italiana, Manifestolibri, Roma 1996.

Freud, S. The ‘Uncanny’, Vienna, 1919 Kristeva J. Powers of Horror, aux editions du seuil, 1980

Muzzonigro A, “ Vincere il Confine “ by Adriana Goñi Mazzitelli, Ed. Aracne , Roma , 2015. Piasere L., Popoli delle discariche, Ed. CISU, Roma,1991. Jackson, S, “Social Works, performing art supporting publics”. Ed Routledge New York 2011. Petti A., Arcipelaghi e enclave. Architettura dell’ordinamento spaziale contemporaneo, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2007. Piasere L., I rom d’Europa, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2004. Rahola, F., Zone definitivamente temporanee. I luoghi dell’umanità in eccesso. Ombre Corte, Verona 2003. Sigona, N., Figli del ghetto. Gli italiani, i campi nomadi e l’invenzione degli zingari., Nonluoghi Libere Edizioni, Divezzano 2002 Spinelli S., Baxtalo Divès, ed Centre des recherches tsiganes, Paris, 2001. Susskind L., Sclavi M., Confronto creativo. Dal diritto alla parola al diritto di essere ascoltati, edizioni Et Al. Milano 2011.

Tileagă T: The Nature of Prejudice: Society, Discrimination and Moral Exclusion, Routledge 2015 Vaux de Foltier, F., Mille anni di storia degli zingari,Ed. Jaca Book, 2010. Wiernicki, K Nomadi per forza. Storia degli zingari, Rusconi, Milano 1997.

ON WEB articiviche.net atisuffix.net

THE PURCHASE OF THIS ITEM WARRANT THE SURVIVAL OF THE ROMA REUSE INDUSTRY This object was bought from the last existing Roma market in Rome; The Don Carlo Gnocchi Market. It was later categorized, cleaned and transformed by the students in January 2016. Its past itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unknown but its future might be bright.

AS WITH OUR PROGRAM ON CAMPUS, OUR INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS ARE GUIDED BY THE SAME PRINCIPLES: • The questions are the content. • Inter-disciplinarity is disciplined knowledge. • Students are the agents of their own education • Education is a dialogical process within a learning community. • Experience is the best teacher. • Learning is not a discrete, linear experience.