Ioli Kavakou takes us back to Roaming Assembly#33 ~ The Script That Passes Through Here ~ a field of unresolved presence, convened by researcher, curator Elisa Giuliano in conversation with Gabriëlle Schleijpen, artistic director DAI, and hosted by Palestra & Cinema Piccolo in Matera, in March 2026.

What Accumulates in the Static: Séance for the Subaltern

Black holes on slippery limestone, cave dwellings spiralling into a paleolithic maze, spa signs, five stars, soft serve artisanal vending machines, sunset vistas and a lot of street Madonnas, come together into a heterogenous landscape—a hybrid of gigantic ant nests mixed with the conviction of being modern. Matera is beautiful, but it’s also a palimpsestic score of stories that have been straightened out into a clean narrative of authenticity. A James Bond backdrop and an ostensible inspiration behind Tolkien’s legendarium, Matera’s biblical looking caves are commonly featured in mainstream culture, omitting mentions of its recent history of sickness, filth and miasma. In the 1950s, Matera won the title of National Shame for the Italian nation as its abysmal sanitation, lack of sewage and subsequent high mortality rates presented an image essentially offensive to the aspirations of a European nation-state. As the stench is replaced by high-demand accommodation units offering continental breakfast, Matera’s history of segregation transforms into a history of appropriation. The forced modernisation of the Sassi, previously inhabited by peasants, shepherds and their livestock, opened up the way for its cultural repurposing. After the subaltern populations were forcibly removed, the way was paved for the new wave of cultural extractivism: tourism and gentrification. 

Tourism of course is somewhat of an intergenerational curse for the Mediterranean, starting in the 17th century with the Grand Tour. An educational rite of passage for—initially British—coming-of-age noble gentlemen, the itinerary proposed socialising with fellow aristocrats while studying classical culture. The advent of the railroad may have waned the allure of the Grand Tour, however it popularised the possibility of travelling abroad. Today, the Mediterranean is a high-end exclusive product meant for individuals, who, consumed by long office hours and the fast paced life of capitalist achievement, turn to the European South in search of an idyllic sanctuary. But the Mediterranean can never be as idyllic as expected. More damning still, it can never be sovereign. It can only exist as a currency traded by centres of power; the lesser pole of the extractive dynamic regulating neocolonial relations within Western cartographies.

European-Mediterranean regions can only exist if packaged into a neat, deterritorialised experience, severing their material reality from suspicious histories carrying threats of backwardness. And so, the “West” has successfully engineered an adaptable discrimination device, which effectuates Othering on various degrees, scales and geographies. In fact, Othering is elected as the hallmark mechanism through which the Western subject attains consciousness, always by opposition or in negation of someone else. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the conceptualisation of the “East” or colonised peoples—it is replicated within the boundaries of the “developed” world itself, where degrees of humanness appear to correlate suspiciously with latitude. The warmer, the poorer: a logic made explicit in the derogatory acronym PIIGS, used to describe EU countries considered economic liabilities.

Italy is an interesting case study as the ontological divide between Man and the Dysselected was first applied internally. This produced a classification system for types of national subjecthood, one that would migrate outward into an imperialist, colonial vision. The 16th century evangelisation of Calabria and Sicily by Jesuits—what Carmine Conelli reads as an internal colonisation—provided the vocabulary for the demotion of the South's ontological status, enforcing colonial tropes on native populations who were seen as superstitious, pagan, essentially primitive. Understood as a national anomaly, the Italian South has been a case of exception to the official narrative of cultural, scientific and economic progress of the North. A response to the 1861 Risorgimento, the Great Brigandage was the peak of guerrilla warfare originating from the South against the policies of the Northern government—a resistance that created an uncomfortable fault line for a nation-state narrating itself as unified and progressive. The response was twofold: military suppression and ideological defamation. The South's refusal to modernise was recast not as legitimate opposition, but as evidence of its own primitiveness—a racialised diagnosis that naturalised Northern dominance and laid the groundwork for Italy's subsequent colonial imagination. As Conelli's research shows, the flip side of the nation was always there, structuring what the nation could claim to be.

Despite their clear racial undertones, these hierarchies proved flexible. Italian racism has consistently repositioned the Southerner as a category— mobile enough to absorb each regime's ideological enemies, stable enough to always designate an internal threat. The common denominator is found in Otherness as a unilateral threat to national integrity; always disruptive of progress, rationality and capitalism. Fascism's strict racial hierarchies envisioned the whitening of the South—a purification from African and Arab cultural influences—an ideology whose residue is legible today in the racism directed at migrants.

Ironically, the fascist dream of a purified white South is now stained with red and brown patches produced by heavy metals and toxic waste illegally disposed in the soil and waters of Basilicata. Associazione COVA Contro’s research at Basento Valley shows a landscape devastated by industrial spills and poisonous chemicals; arsenic, lead, zinc, iron and radioactive waste seep deep into the land, performing a slow and insidious unaliving of both the ecosystem and the people it nurtures. Pollution is a potent necropolitical tool able to transform the Earth into a foul prison. The contaminated land does not need walls or guards—it incarcerates through the body itself, turning breath, water and soil into vectors of slow death that are nearly impossible to flee; and that this violence is consistently concentrated in already marginalised territories is not incidental—it is the Southern Question restated in chemical form, the colour line drawn not in law, but in the ground.

In 2020, Milo Rau directed the movie The New Gospel, which was filmed in Matera. The film retells the passions of Christ, but Jesus is an immigrant fighting for his community’s rights, played by political activist Yvan Sagnet. Yvan’s life is also worthy of a movie. Moving to Italy from Cameroon because of his love for football and the 1990 world-cup tournament song, “Notti Magiche”, a series of unfortunate events led him to lose his scholarship, leaving him in need of a job. Through word of mouth he heard about the fields of Nardó. Moving from his place in Turin to the ghetto, Yvan was introduced to the caporale, the gang masters running the plantations. Exposed to what turned out to be modern day slavery, the workers of Nardó would cherry pick tomatoes for 3.5 euros per approximately 300 kg. Yvan’s public struggle began after attempting to pursue better pay, which led him to collide with the caporale, enabling his activist trajectory and his fight against exploitation in the agricultural sector.

Yvan’s life and politics demonstrate how neoliberal economies and their extensive supply chains obscure conditions of production in favour of low pricing. The 9-cent-a-kilo tomato at the supermarket shelf, is a red flag indexing the interrelation of cost-efficient products with unethical and illegal labour conditions. Global price efficiency is taxed on the bodies of some workers, who fall ill due to exhaustion, malnutrition and poor health care, so first class citizens can enjoy their affordable salads. The perversion of a generalised capitalist mechanism where powerful distributors dictate market prices renders legal labour unsustainable. This system reenforces the extractive dynamic between economic centres of power and their agricultural peripheries, as well as a divergent ontological evaluation of the subject who is a worker, and another who is a consumer.

Dressing extraction as cultural recovery is an old trick. Mussolini's quest to drain Lake Nemi in search of Caligula's alleged imperial ships is a case in point. Visualised in Diana's Looking Glass, a haunting video by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, the Duce’s fixation on Romanitas forced a spectacle of extraction; a large-scale labour mobilisation meant to unearth and reinstate skeletons of grandeur. The successful retrieval of the ships and their subsequent positioning in a museum paints a picture of historical narration as deliberate preference; a choice of which past to resurrect. The pagan lore of the lake as Diana’s place of worship, goddess of the earth, the hunt and the moon, is buried and reframed as a repository of the Roman Imperium. Fascism extracts the spiritual significance of Lake Nemi, replacing its sacred history with an imperialist vision. 

Tints of dark yellows and greenish blues create an eerie atmosphere coupled with a sense of impending doom. Sometimes the screen turns red. We are now following Mussolini’s 1926 Tripoli campaign. Scenes of infantry and cavalry greeted by the locals are edited next to aerial images of skeletons and rotting animal carcasses. Stereotypes of imperial heroism blend together with images of death; a strange inversion of Diana’s lurking ghost. The primitive hunt is succeeded by a superior, colonial hunt, euphemistically dubbed as “the civilising mission.”

Mussolini’s return to the mythopoeia of the Caesarean imperium signifies the male appropriation of Diana’s originating power. Appropriating a terrifying but birthing Eurasian female goddess, fascism reframes Lake Nemi from a sacred landscape to an emblem of colonial supremacy. The draining of the lake implements the erasure of syncretic influences towards what Sylvia Wynter has called the overrepresentation of Man. The Renaissance's rekindled interest in antiquity reintroduced pagan symbols into the Western imaginary—symbols that, following Warburg's thought, had found an earlier home in the Islamic world before migrating westward. Warburg’s last project, Mnemosyne Atlas, is an attempt to map the afterlives of paganism in the era of Christianity. Despite being praised for his non-linear approach to history, Warburg’s exploration of the cosmogonic codes that direct the universal drama of human existence fails to examine Europe’s colonial self-making. It is here that Anselm Franke's analysis becomes crucial: where Warburg sees a universal symbolic language migrating across cultures, Franke identifies a self-mythologising cosmology whose white mythopoeia actively universalises the European experience while obscuring its colonial foundations.

Warburg's fatal optimism lies in misreading the Lateran treaties as a secularising victory—the rational state finally pacifying the irrational church—without registering what was actually being consolidated: a fascist cosmology with a new, purified origin myth. The year of his death, 1929, is also the year this myth begins to meet its adversary. In 1930, the fascist lion encounters the Ethiopian lion. The coronation of Haile Selassie as Emperor marks the rise of Pan-Africanism not merely as a political movement, but as a valid epistemological alternative to Western universalism; a counter-cosmology with its own symbolic grammar. Ethiopia, having never been colonised, becomes a promissory landscape. For the Rastafari, whose spiritual geography refuses the cartography of empire, Selassie becomes a messianic figure, "The Lion of Judah.” Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia is in this sense not just territorial ambition but an ontological emergency, an attempt to eliminate the proof that another world-picture was possible. It also resolved an internal problem: the South, long cast as Italy's shameful periphery, was now repositioned as the empire's threshold—its backwardness reframed as proximity to Africa, rendering its marginality useful.

A documentary yet to be made features a fascinating story that borders on conspiracy. The Heist of the Century: The Story of Gaddafi’s Gold traces the disappearance of 143 tons of Libyan gold allegedly gathered to mint the first African dinar. Pan-Africanism’s refusal to assimilate under a Western ideology led Gaddafi to come up with a plan to create a tangible asset-based currency made from gold, largely relying on Libya’s gold reserves. The gold dinar would allow for Arab and African countries with oil reserves to export bypassing the US dollar, potentially suppressing its global demand. This account tiptoes between history and a new revolutionary myth. The creation of a gold-backed unified African currency posed an obvious threat to the hegemony of the American petrodollar; a cornerstone of today’s extractive economy. Somewhat of a holy grail, the gold dinar would bring Africa’s financial emancipation and is conjecturally discussed as the reason behind Gaddafi’s 2011 murder followed by NATO’s invasion of Libya. Within the realm of speculation, interviews, personal anecdotes and a film that was never filmed, Jihan El-Tahri says she has seen a photo of the real African gold dinar.

Today, the coast of Libya has become what anthropologist Viola Castellano has termed the carceral coast—a zone of exception filled with detention centres, where the externalisation of European border control reconfigures rather than breaks from colonial precedent. The Friendship Treaty, signed by Berlusconi and Gaddafi in 2008, was a two-part agreement where Italy promised reparations to Libya in return for stricter border controls. The camps operate on a predatory basis where bodies are extracted, confined and then “rescued” by Italian institutions. In prisons like Al-Hasa or Tarik al-Sika, the Dysselected are placed in a limbo where the mere amount of detainees constitutes the act of standing up a luxury:

“No space, just sitting for 2 months. You can’t sleep you can’t go to the toilet, there are people there. You can’t even stand because people will take your space.”—Detention camp testimony

Discussed as “Mal di Libya,” this arrangement manifests Italy's colonial attachment as an externalisation of European borders, where crimes against humanity are justified through the civilisational alibi that Libya needs Italian reinforcements to manage migration. This sets up a necroeconomy where the migrant body is a resource to be mined. As accountability chains from Libya to Brussels are obscured, Libya’s political dependence on Italy is further cultivated.

Alessandra Ferrini’s video Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship examines the political build up towards the Friendship Treaty by deconstructing the media spectacle of Gaddafi’s and Berlusconi’s rapport. As Italian media was obsessing over the Bedouin tent Gaddafi brought with him to Rome, the neocolonial deal was being sealed, legitimising the diplomatic whitening of the carceral securitisation of the Libyan border. Presented as an amicable resolution, the treaty allowed Italy to experiment with new forms of territorial occupation where pacification was replaced by the fortification of the Libyan borders as a means of clinging onto a pure, white Europe. Gaddafi's death accelerated the treaty's ratification while conveniently foreclosing the question of reparations, meaning Italy’s promised compensation for its colonial occupation of Libya was never paid.

An inversion of the spectacle of Gaddafi's Bedouin tent in Rome can be seen in Muna Mussie's film Cinema Impero, named after the largest movie theatre built during the Italian colonial period in Asmara, Eritrea. Constructed by fascists in 1937, the cinema was off-limits for the locals, a site reserved for the imperial gaze. Following juxtapositions of black and white archival footage portraying Mussolini’s visit to Eritrea next to coloured scenes of a man driving his car through the desert, Mussie’s film performs a visual desanitization of the colonial archive. In the film’s metanarrative the duality of the lion resurfaces: on one hand a symbol of Pan-African sovereignty and on the other an emblem of the fascist regime. The notion of the hunt returns, this time as a haunting scene of a giant fish beaten and fished out of the sea. Viscerally delivered, the film portrays a series of predator and prey relations, as well as sites of debris indicating the complex historical stratigraphies of Eritrean history.

Tewa Barnosa's Insurgence of Ghibli Winds offers a counter-history of Italy's first attack on Libya in 1911 that refuses the archive's own terms. Exploring traditional aerial warfare tactics alongside contemporary gamified militarism, Tewa centres the Sahara not as a theatre of operations but as a living atmospheric force. The Ghibli winds carry red desert dust northward across the Mediterranean, a material crossing that no border treaty regulates, no detention centre contains. Tewa treats the wind as an agent with its own insurgent logic: it does not resist capture by overpowering it, but by remaining perpetually unresolved—shifting, redistributing, reappearing elsewhere. Edited alongside first-person shooter footage, archival material and fragments of Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, the winds move between registers of beauty and violence without settling into either. If the carceral coast is defined by its capacity to fix, detain and immobilise bodies, the Ghibli wind is its structural antagonist, presence without location, force without form, haunting without a ghost.

Mark Mushiva frames African accelerationism as the opposite of its Landian counterpart. Where the latter imagines capitalism accelerating toward its own dissolution as a future horizon, African accelerationism begins from the recognition that this horizon has already been inhabited repeatedly, involuntarily, by those whose bodies were the infrastructure of capitalist speed. The plantation, the detention centre, the toxic field in Basento Valley: these are not waiting rooms for a collapse yet to come, but crash sites that keep being rebuilt on the same coordinates. Central to Mushiva's proposition is the strategic reclamation of ethnographic instruments—the tools built to document, classify and contain African life—turned back against the epistemologies that produced them. He acknowledges that the end of the world is not a future catastrophe to be feared but an event with a long history of repetition. The people most practised in living through endings are precisely those whom Western narratives cast as prehistory—“Black is a metaphor and we don’t want the lights”/ “Nothing bright is what it seems”/ “I am black so you don’t have to be.”

Giulia Crispiani's intermittent conjurings and exorcisms were met with technological resistance that appeared almost personal. A screeching microphone is usually the result of an unfortunate feedback loop—the mic picks up its own amplified sound, creating an output that is acoustically unbearable. It distorts speech, suspends communication and interferes with the message it's supposed to boost. Google states that “standing too close to the speakers” is a common cause of this otherworldly electronic howl. Crispiani's spells invited this proximity. The mundane technical difficulty became a voice in its own right—a haunting rather than a problem to be fixed. 

In Matera, the shrieks that erupted during the invocations became scattered presences: despite the technicians' efforts to silence them, their acute sounds were held as intentional complaints, exaggerations, screams, laments, reminders, declarations, signs of all the invisible scripts traversing the space; below, above and through. The symposium turned into a séance, a round table for the living and the dead, where the message is not what survives transmission intact, but what accumulates in the static between an already mediated origin and our attending bodies. Under Crispiani's spell, presence becomes a messy genre of existence—bouncing between timelines, spaces and vessels not exclusive to, but sometimes passing through humans.

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