Borgo Mezzanone

Abstract

Just a few steps away from the fascist village of Borgo Mezzanone, lies the largest informal settlement in Apulia. A piece of sub-Saharan city occupying the Italian territory, in the heart of Foggia province countryside. The observation of the spaces of Borgo Mezzanone invites us to reflect upon the precarious nature of human beings’ livelihoods in the world and urges a debate on raciality issues in deliberately obscured contexts. What happens in sites where resistance and tensions between spaces and bodies become so radical? What devices or infrastructures shape them? What do the terms protection and life mean in such a context? Borgo Mezzanone is an extreme territory. It reveals itself as a racist scene, a place of resistance and dependence on extractive logics and exploitative dynamics, muscular and carnal, in which the unbearable tensions between bodies, languages, noises and colours are asserted amidst hard and rejecting spaces.