HOMES 14th edition
October 24 – 27, 2024
the spring of 2023, 23-year-old engineering student Ilaria Lamera picketed a tent in Leonardo Square, in front of the Politecnico, to protest against high rents in Milan. Within days, other off-site students joined the protest, turning a public square into an open-air campsite. In the following days, the student protest branched out to Rome, Bologna, and Pisa in the following weeks.
In July 2024, at the height of the summer tourist peak, several tourists in Malaga and Barcelona were “attacked” by groups of housing activists with water pistols and signs against Airbnb housing. At the same time, a banner appeared in the streets of Palermo’s historic centere with the words Touristification is the new plague. Where is my home? Viva Santa Rosalia [Touristification is the new plague. Where is my home? Viva Santa Rosalia].

Tents, water guns, and banners become emblems of a widespread problem concerning the non livability/complexity of our cities, the right to housing or its denial, and the claim for more equitable and sustainable ways of coexistence.
Talking about housing involves an individual dimension – our personal story can be described as a story of changing homes – and a collective one – access to housing is a political issue in which class, gender, geography of origin, cognitive capital are intertwined.
Home can also be aspiration, pain, lack, nostalgia, and not just a pragmatic issue for politicians and architects. It is no accident that languages such as English distinguish between “house,” the material home, the architectural apparatus in which one lives, and “home,” the symbolic home, there where one feels one belongs; or in the words of Egyptian poet Naguib Mahfouz, “There where all your attempts to escape cease.”

Housing is also the theme of the 14th edition of Video Sound Art that will take place in the Lodi – Corvetto neighborhood, the pivot of an ongoing process of urban transformation in Milan. Nearly equidistant from the city’s Cathedral and the Abbey of Chiaravalle and thus from the Milanese fields, it symbolically represents a split between the center and the suburbs that still characterizes the neighborhood’s soul. The area between the former Porta Romana railway yard and the Rogoredo woods is indeed crossed by contradictions. On the one hand, its working-class soul is evidence of a near past in which small factories and residential complexes for the laboring classes lived in the neighborhood. Almost a century ago, the area housed the first experiments in social housing (later to become Aler, owned by the Region), which constituted the neighboring “Mazzini district. On the other, the recent construction of potential urban regeneration projects, such as the Symbiosis-Covivio “business district,” the Prada Foundation and the soon-to-be-built Olympic village for the 2026 Olympics.
Although the arrival of these new infrastructures is presented as the outset of a regeneration process, large groups of citizens, organized according to neighborhood committees, instead claim another kind of narrative. Indeed, transgenerational and multiethnic communities linked to realities that have been active in the neighborhood for decades, such as Circolo San Luis (Via Don Bosco, 7) claim a sense of belonging to an area that is anything but anonymous and desolate. The friction between contrasting propositions found in the Lodi-Corvetto district represents in miniature the same frictions found on a larger scale at the city level.

The festival finds its home in the Lodi Corvetto neighborhood and in particular at Circolo San Luis 1946. In collaboration with the neighborhood committee, activities will carry on from October the 24 to October 27. With a dense program including a series of video installations, performances and activations, the festival will create a choral narrative around the theme of housing.
Can we look at houses as barometers that are capable of recording the major changes (political, societal, environmental) that are currently taking place? What are the houses in which new strategies of coexistence and cohabitation are being tested?
Text “Le mie case” by Erica Petrillo
Bibliography:
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, 2001
Penlin Tan, “Camps as Trans-Local Commons” in e-flux conversations, 17 July 2017
Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity” in Poetics of Relation, 1990
Céline Condorelli, Support Structures, 2009
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004
14th edition
October 24 – 27, 2024
Venues:
Circolo San Luis,
Via Don Bosco, 7
Piazza San Luigi
MM3 Lodi, Milano
Curated by
Laura Lamonea e Erica Petrillo
Open Call Coordinator
Tommaso Santagostino
The research HOMES is by
Erica Petrillo with BASE Milano
developed in the context of a
curatorial residency in the 2023/2024