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).