Giovanni Cocco, Displacement, 2021

Displacement is a journey in the cities that change because of abandonment, that rebuild themselves and ruin. It is a journey into loss, without it being a disappearance. The loss of a body-city that we don’t want to mourn, but rather find again in the forms in which intimacy and community are sought, as freely as possible. We found ourselves in the city of L’Aquila to narrate the new life generated by the loss of the center and the displacement of the inhabitants towards the suburbs. A city of empty streets, of new houses for sale, of buildings resurfaced from the dust with the names of hotels, banks and stores, whose population lives lost in the New Town, a dormitory suburb, whose square is the traffic circle of a shopping center. A cartography of change. An approach of images and words, intimate, affective, to the abandoned, separated city. Where the margin seems to be the center and where, as in other suburbs of the world, the disorientation is bodily: inside and outside coincide and overlap, are lost in the dark. The darkness of those who seek and seek themselves.