Entity of Decolonization

Entity of Decolonization investigates how the ruins and remnants of fascist modernist architectures continue to operate in the present, long after the political regimes that produced them have disappeared. Set in southern Italy, Libya, and Palestine, it approaches heritage as a contested terrain in which histories of violence and resistance are sedimented in space and explores what these architectures once were and how they might become inhabited otherwise.

The book expands on DAAR’s (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) critical exploration of practices to suspend inherited functions and to open them to new forms of collective uses. The case study at its core is Borgo Rizza, a rural settlement built in Sicily in 1940 by the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano, fascist Italy’s agency for the colonisation of land on Sicily.

Entity of Decolonization shows how through collective gathering, learning, reuse, care, and inhabitation, inherited architectures are interrupted and reoriented in an anti-colonial, anti-fascist sense to become a field of political practice that eliminates separations between past and present, object and use, architecture and life.