La Zattera (the Raft)
A Performative Archive of Forgotten Memories, Marginal Realities, and Lost Futures of Modern Rome

Organized by

Lorenzo Romito
Senior Fellow 2023–2024

Giulia Fiocca

Informations

Venue: ETH RZ-D 8, Clausiusstrasse 59, 8006 Zürich

This is a public event. Participation is free of charge and registration is not required.

La Zattera was initiated in 2020 in Rome as an experience of civic engagement, co-involving artistic research with urban and social exploration. It is a nomadic performative archive that collects—through public and shared processes—the dispersed and removed living memories of those who have inhabited the city of Rome both invisibly and informally during its 150 year history as a capital city, struggling for city rights and generating innovative ways of living.

La Zattera is a “cargo” of stories collected by wanderings along those margins between memory and oblivion, needs and desires, real and possible, with the goal of generating and sharing a counter narrative of the modern history of Rome (1870–2023). It recounts both the experiences of those who over the years have documented and witnessed the struggle for living, and those experiences of artistic, cultural and social innovation that have, through time, arisen from its midsts.

Lorenzo Romito and Giulia Fiocca are both co-founders of Stalker, a Roman collective of architects, activists, and researchers. La Zattera will be proposed as a possible reference for an eventual development of a similar narrative on Zurich and Switzerland.

In collaboration with

Visiting Professorship for Italian Literature and Culture