Borgo Mezzanone

Rurality, ethnicity, racial conflict

Abstract

In Borgo Mezzanone stands, a few steps from the fascist village, the largest informal settlement in Puglia. A real piece of sub-Saharan city transplanted in the Italian territory, in the middle of the countryside of the province of Foggia. Observing the spaces of Borgo Mezzanone, invites us to reflect on the themes of the precariousness of our being in the world and raises the urgency of placing the debate on the issues of race in deliberately obscured contexts. Here, the intensity of the presence of migrants raises the question of the relationship between rurality, ethnicity and racial conflict. What happens in places where resistances and tensions between spaces and bodies become so radical? What devices or infrastructures shape them? What are grafted as protective devices to a life of those who can only survive? What do the terms protection and life mean in such a context? Borgo Mezzanone is an extreme territory. It reveals itself as a racial scene, a place of resistance and dependence on extractive logics and exploitative dynamics, a muscular and carnal space, where the unbearable tensions between bodies, languages, noises and colors are declared within hard and excluding spaces.