The Raft Adrift through Stories and Imaginaries of the Invisible City
The Raft–La Zattera is a Stalker project, a mobile device, a nomadic archive, via which we began through public and shared processes to collect the dispersed and removed memories of those who have inhabited the city of Rome, invisibly and informally, during its 150 year history as a capital city. The Raft evokes a condition of survival–a wandering adrift that becomes a project and strategy for reading and interpreting the traces of a largely forgotten recent history. It recalls the places and the social and cultural history of informal, migrant and subaltern Rome, the artistic representations that have embraced it, and remembers too the struggles and rights conquered through the innovatory forms it has produced in both civil and social spheres: all this thanks to the processes and languages of education and art.
At the beginning of March 2024 a three-month observatory will be taking place in Zurich, during which we will present the “cargo” of stories, memories, maps, and traces that the Raft has collected in its wanderings along those margins between memory and oblivion through the history of contemporary Rome (1870–2023).