As part of the 5x5x5 program of Manifesta 12 in Palermo, the Decolonizing Architecture research group at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm presented a project for critical re-use of the Casa del Mutilato – a fascist building designed by Giuseppe Spatrisano and inaugurated by Benito Mussolini in 1936. The project took the form of an architectural intervention; a prosthesis to the Casa del Mutilato which acted as a tool to reorient the future uses of the building and pragmatically start a much-needed restoration process. As part of the intervention, we a curated conference and suggested the first plenary meeting of the “Coalition for re-use of colonial fascist architecture.” The coalition was established with the aim of producing research and planning interventions for the re-use of colonial-fascist architecture by, and for communities that directly or indirectly have been affected by past and present forms of fascism and colonization.
Invited guests, including Mia Fuller, Adelita Husni-Bey, Nicola Labanca, Shourideh C.
Molavi, Peter Lang, Vittoria Capresi, Sandi Hilal, Cristina Lucas, Andrea Bagnato, Anna Positano, Emilio Distretti, Rahel Shawl debated the legacies and ruins of Italian fascist architecture and their mutilated histories in a symposium.
I led a spatial intervention in the Modernist, fascist building of Casa del Mutilato which critically used the tools of mass tourism in order to suggest an inclusive process of repair to Palermo’s sexual minorities who were repressed under Mussolini, creating a space for queer memory in the city that would honour their exceptional activist culture.
