Rethinking Lampedusa
(Art Residency and Research Program)
The research group engages critically with the condition of the migrant challenging the concept
of borders and the idea of nation-state, speculating
on the concept of the island as an utopia where
an inclusive, communal and reciprocal way of living
is possible.
team
Leonardo Caffo
Carlo Alberto Giardina
Roberta Esposito
MADE Program Academy (Sicily)
Through different workshops and participatory practices, as well through a shared experience of communal living, the research group reflects on alternative methodologies of knowledge production to activate new ways of thinking and doing, embodying art as a radical modality for responding to current urgencies as well as to the unknown.
“Rethinking Lampedusa” is a research project and art-residency organized by Made Program in Siracusa and originally promoted by the Northeastern University in Boston. Coordinated by Leonardo Caffo, the research group, which includes artists, photographers, musicians, and students, has worked over the years on a geo-imaginary and political design mapping of the island of Lampedusa in collaboration with Mediterranean Hope.
Formal tutors and external guests will guide participants through site specific explorations, pedagogical experiments and open discussions, cultivating an embodied knowledge of agency.
The program offers horizontal – non-hierarchical and participatory – workshop activities based on different experiential explorations of the island according to students preferred artistic practice. Sounds, movements, maps, photographs and video, utopian manifestos, come together to draw a new geo-political metaphor for the Sicilian island, unfolding the condition of the central Mediterranean area as a way to understand the contemporary condition.
“When you’re in Lampedusa, migrants are nowhere to be seen”
Each year, artistic Moleskines have been designed to keep track of the experience and try to transfer the island’s utopia, including concepts such as the failure of integration, Toni Negri’s idea of the new barbarians, migration as a dismissal of the nation-state, the temporary autonomous zones, the theater of cruelty.
Leonardo Caffo™ 