Emilio Distretti on Critical Architectural Heritage

Is there such a thing as “perpetual design”? How to subvert the founding principles of colonial architecture? Modernist architecture and planning, designed to separate life-worlds and alterity, can be turned against itself? Imagine a series of fascist colonial modernist settlements in Sicily’s countryside in the Italian South, first erected in the 1940s following the model of colonial planning in the African colonies, for celebrating fascist supremacy and then left empty and abandoned in the aftermath of WWII. 

Looking at these hollow spaces, in this seminar I will share possible experiments for critical, anti-colonial and anti-fascist re-use and (non)preservation of architectural heritage, together with strategies of homemaking in fragile and hostile environments aimed to challenge the symbols of our violent pasts and present: radical pedagogies, queer conservation and sabotage, making doubles and imitation games and, last but not least, one big fire.