DAAR - Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal

DAAR’s contribution to The Laboratory of the Future explores the possibilities of critical reappropriation, reuse, and subversion of fascist colonial architecture and its modernist legacy. The work is an attempt to profane the rural settlement of Borgo Rizza (Syracuse, Sicily), built in 1940 by the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano (ECLS, Entity of Colonisation of Sicilian Latifundia). Its function was to reclaim, modernise, and repopulate Sicily, which the fascist regime considered backward, underdeveloped, and ‘empty”. A similar architectural blueprint was adopted by fascist colonial urban planning in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia around the same time.
The installation is a scaled reproduction of the village’s main building façade, which the artists deconstructed into fifteen multipurpose modules that since May 2022 have been engaging conversations with different sites (Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples, Hansaviertel district in Berlin, and La Loge museum in Brussels).

Team
Husam Abusalem, Emilio Distretti, Matteo Lucchetti, Sara Pellegrini
Courtesy
Collection Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee - Madre, Napoli
Project realized with the support of Italian Council 2021
Technical collaborators
orizzontale, Zapoi
With the additional support of
Museo delle Civiltà, Roma; Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm