The Decolonising Architecture Art Research programme is a one-year posgraduate research trajectory for practice based researchers in architecture and the arts.
Through experimental research-shares, communal assemblies, and critical approaches to permaculture, architecture, and artistic practice, we investigated the theme of rural commons.
As a participant of DAAS, I deepened my ongoing study of Italian mezzadria through my interest in the social and physical architectures that shaped the rural landscape of Pescara Colli (IT).
Through the identification of a main concept, and a site, I delved into the history of my mother’s neighborhood by foraging with her, and experimented with a ritual bread making as a sharing of embodied knowledge and memory through ritual.
Below, some excerpts of that research.
Through experimental research-shares, communal assemblies, and critical approaches to permaculture, architecture, and artistic practice, we investigated the theme of rural commons.
As a participant of DAAS, I deepened my ongoing study of Italian mezzadria through my interest in the social and physical architectures that shaped the rural landscape of Pescara Colli (IT).
Through the identification of a main concept, and a site, I delved into the history of my mother’s neighborhood by foraging with her, and experimented with a ritual bread making as a sharing of embodied knowledge and memory through ritual.
Below, some excerpts of that research.
Decolonising Architecture Art Research: Al Masha, Rural Commons
Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
2023-2024
under the mentorship of Alessandro Petti and Judith Wielander
in partnernship with: Casa delle Agricolture (Diso) and Entity of Decolonisation - Ex Borgo (Carlentini)
Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
2023-2024
under the mentorship of Alessandro Petti and Judith Wielander
in partnernship with: Casa delle Agricolture (Diso) and Entity of Decolonisation - Ex Borgo (Carlentini)
Comparàtico
comparàtico s. m. [der. of compare] (pl. -ci). – 1. a. The bond of spiritual cognation that binds the compari or comari (comrades?) of the baptism and christening to their godchildren, and the wedding witnesses to the newly weds. b. The spiritual relationship that two people of usually opposing genders contract following several popular rites (especially in Calabria) on the day of St. John the Baptist (24th June). 2. The ensemble of rituals in which traditionally different categories of ‘compari’ take part.
Author’s Translation
Author’s Translation
“comparàtico s. m. [der. di compare] (pl. -ci). – 1. a. Il vincolo di cognazione spirituale che lega i compari o le comari di battesimo e di cresima ai loro figliocci, e i compari di nozze agli sposi. b. La spirituale relazione che due persone, in genere di sesso diverso, contraggono in seguito a varie usanze popolari (spec. in Calabria) il giorno di s. Giovanni Battista (24 giugno). 2. L’insieme delle cerimonie a cui tradizionalmente prendono parte le diverse categorie di compari.”
Enciclopedia Treccani
Enciclopedia Treccani
According to Raffaele Corso, who generously filled in a page of the Enciclopedia Traccani on this matter, the comparàtico is a word through which several obligations associated to the role of being someone’s compare (masc.) or comare (fem.) can be categorised. Despite this attempt at ratification, being someone’s compare or comare can mean entirely different things depending on how the choice of taking up this role was made.
One can be a comare di nozze, a bridesmaid, meaning they will walk the bride to the altar, put the ring on her finger, accompany her to her new home, and gift her something valuable. They can also be a compare di battesimo, meaning a godfather, and they will take part in the Christian rite and take care of the child should this become orphaned. But one can also become a comare by cutting a baby’s first hair or nails, or by piercing their ears for the first time. And although Corso reminds us that the rituals that bind the invisible but tangible ties of comparàtico vary in Italy from region to region, and even village to village, it is clear from his account as from our experience that the meaning of comparàtico is that of an informal institution of community-life akin to the idea of an elected family.
Through the choices that institute the relationship of comparàtico, members of a community take agency over the structures that influence their daily lives. They decide which members of their families and friend group might be able to take care of their child, and who they can trust near their newborn with a sharp scorching needle. To bind oneself to another person in this way means claiming back agency over the way our relations are structured by way of imagination, magic and poetics. It is a simple act of survival and also a celebration of that texture of life that produced us already as a common subject. The slow rhythms of Abruzzo’s comparàtico rituals, performed across a whole night and day, are a form of anachronistic resistance: herbs are foraged and exposed to the moonlight before being gifted and used to wash each other’s face. Red ribbons tie the young hands that laugh at the words of some ancient rite, and the lived reality of this moment becomes a shoe - that is a weapon - which can be thrown into the works of modernity, sabotaging for a moment the linear paradigms that will reshape us into ‘individuals’ tomorrow.
Li Cull’ ![]()
There is a field lying uncultivated in a neighborhood of the city of Pescara (IT), a place known in dialect as Li Cull’ - the hills. This field is the site. It belongs to a family of landowners who owned this land for longer than anybody can remember. Li Cull’ is a peripheral fraction of the provincial city of Pescara (IT). Interviewed by the press, locals refer to it as a place that has “lost its soul and identity”.
Over the past twenty years, ‘Pescara Colli’ transformed according to some locals on instagram into a kind of #colliwood. The neighborhood is no longer home to a strong rural community tied to its landscape. The edification boom that followed the 1980s miracolo economico italiano has ended, leaving behind the empty skeletons of unfinished residential buildings and rivers of terraced houses where ‘home’ is a brand of post-industrial ready mix made of IKEA tables and cement. My mother was born in colliwood the 15th of November 1963. In nine days, I will pack up my life and move back to Li Cull’, in one of the terraced houses that borders this field. I still know this field like I did as a kid, as the place of fantastical snakes and scary rustling noises reverberating across its all grasses.
I have learned to know it as others did, in the way that adults know everything, which is just gossip. I learned one day at Santa’s, over coffee, about how when the old man - the land owner - was still alive Minuccio had asked him why he kept the olives unpicked on their branches. To this, the old man is said to have answered that he did because la gente s’addà affamà (‘people need to be hungry’). I choose to know this site as someone who believes Santa and Minuccio’s story, so that their honesty, their humility, and the kindness with which they have been the centre of our hamlet’s communal life, becomes part of the field as I know it. The field is uncultivated, but not unkept. Twice a year, following the ingegnere’s call to the fire department, the heirs of the old man send someone to cut the grass so as to prevent fires. Then all goes again quiet. It is then that the others start to appear: the couple that walks the french bulldogs, the recovering heroine addict whose herb garden makes the grandmothers mutter, and the elderly gentleman carrying a plastic bag, who only shows up after rain showers. My mum says he is searching for snails as we watch him disappear in the new growth.
View of the abandoned field from my house in Pescara Colli (2024).
Workshop participant makes herself as a cookie to cast a spell in favour of voice (2023).