Biography

Gabriele Leo (spatial practitioner, curator and researcher) is 1/4 of POST DISASTER (Gabriele Leo, Gabriella Mastrangelo, Grazia Mappa, Peppe Frisino) an interdisciplinary collective whose practice intersects spatial, performative and curatorial actions. Their research uses the metaphor of disaster as a local lens to investigate territories in relation to global dynamics and tensions.

They started their collaboration in 2018 by starting POST DISASTER ROOFTOPS, a curatorial and spatial practice staged on the rooftops of Taranto - an industrial city in southern Italy that is going through a long-term environmental, social and economic crisis.

Their work has been exhibited at independent platforms and cultural institutions such as Biennale di Venezia, Triennale Milano, Cà Foscari University – Venice, Fondazione Matera-Basilicata 2019, Malta Art Biennale.

Artistic project

The Unfinished Barricade is a temporary occupation of urban spaces through a series of spatial devices that aim to resignify the existing spatial infrastructures. Through the construction of a porous border, the project understands the barricade as a temporary “infrastructure of sociality” where the performative relations between (collective) body and space can find alternative forms of negotiations. 

The concept comes from a critical perspective of the role of barricades throughout history, seen as devices that can generate spatial conflict but also interconnection. The notion of “unfinished” refers to the inherent nature of the barricade, seen less as a static object and more as an “architecture of circulation” between places, people, and ideologies, a space of coexistence in which the solidarities forged by communal effort expand toward a collective horizon. Before being a warfare or spatial infrastructure, then, the barricade is an infrastructure for the socialisation of counter-hegemonic processes and is only complete when it is inhabited by the bodies and practices that are articulated around it. 

More than a project per se, Unfinished Barricade is a critical-spatial practice conceived as a device to question the systems of powers that affect the places we inhabit, reclaiming spaces (and times) of collective autonomy and self-determination.

Format: spatial devices (installation) + happenings

Size of audience: unlimited

Specific location: conventional public space (the corner of a square, a piece of a boulevard, a portion of a car park, an under-used green area...)

Timing / duration: 2-3 days to one month, depending on collaborative patterns