Displacement, by Giovanni Cocco and Caterina Serra. With Giovanni Cocco, Tiziana Faraoni and Daniele Zendroni, studio Visionair

“It is night, L’Aquila is darker than a winter field. We don’t hear anything, we don’t see enough. We are a little scared, a little also excited. It’s because of the empty houses, wide open.
Life pours out of those holes, gaping, obscene. The darkness of a city without lights is deep, sunken between the walls. Different from any other. Our bewilderment is also given by the city’s distortion. By its unrecognizability. There are street names, yet they do not correspond to what they were. Never mind, never mind the names, I tell myself, they are what they lead to that matters now.
After the big mass relocation. The dislocation. The dispersal. We lose ourselves too.”
Caterina Serra

Displacement is a journey of words and images in the cities that change through abandonment, that rebuilding ruins. Giovanni Cocco and Caterina Serra found themselves in the city of L’Aquila to narrate the new life generated by the loss of the center and the displacement of inhabitants to the suburbs. A city of emptied streets, of new houses for sale, of buildings resurfaced from dust with names of hotels, banks and stores, whose population inhabits lost New Towns, a suburb-dormitory, whose square is the traffic circle of a shopping center.
This research work that lasted more than 10 years (2012 – 2021) became a book edited by Tiziana Faraoni and designed by Visionair studio.