A New Urban Oddysey
In times of housing crisis and real estate speculation, migrants, homeless, evicted moderns like Ulysses, shipwrecked people in the contemporary metropolis, find refuge and a safe harbour in a former barracks abandoned for years. The Porto Fluviale, like Penelope, weaves a 10-year-long canvas offering a home to those who don’t have it, refreshment to sailors, activities and skills to the neighbourhood. But the sky is anything but serene, real estate speculators like Proci are constantly lurking, ordering Penelope to take one of them in marriage. Meanwhile, the Ulysses of Porto Fluviale face all sorts of vicissitudes, cleverly beating the Polifemi, the Circe sorceresses, the Sirens that threaten their path. Fortunately, a deity, called the Housing Right, protects them from Olympus …
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche 
image courtesy: Laboratorio Arti Civiche
An Odyssey for Porto Fluviale is a practice-based research through the phenomenon of informal dwelling and cultural diversity in the city of Rome by means of an artistic intervention at scale 1:1.
Laboratorio Arti Civiche, together with the students of Architecture of the Università Roma Tre has developed a long term collaboration with the community of inhabitants dwelling in Porto Fluviale in Rome, one of the housing squats belonging to the Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa, a political movement struggling for housing rights.
Porto Fluviale houses about 120 nucleuses coming from Maruecco, Equador, Perù, Lybia, Egypt, Tunisia, Eritrea, Italia.
The artistic intervention consisted in physically transforming the common spaces of the Porto Fluviale, particularly the entrance and the courtyard, in a real imaginative harbour. The purpose was to involve the inhabitants and the citizens in a poetic and oneiric immersive narration that becomes the spatial support for an inclusive debate around housing rights in Rome.
An Odissey for Porto Fluviale is a laboratory for an inclusive, resisting and participated city.
role: project coordinator
for: Laboratorio Arti Civiche
in collaboration with: Dipsu, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
year: 2011
