Architetture del Postporre

Architetture del postporre is a walkshop developed by Communal Matters on the occasion of the fifth edition of Biennale Internazionale Donna La Boemia sta sul mare — Esercitare discontinuità, immaginare altrimenti. Through a situated walk in Trieste’s Porto Vecchio, the project operates as a critical counter-narrative to the Porto Vivo development, which proposes the construction of a so-called “monumental boulevard” connecting the city centre to the former port area.

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In dialogue with Linea d’Ombra ODV, an organisation active in supporting migrants along the Balkan route, the walk interrogates the spatial and political implications of urban regeneration processes. The abandoned buildings of the port, currently used as informal shelters by people in transit, make visible a condition that cannot be reduced to mere bureaucratic delay. Rather, they emerge as architectures of postponement: spatial and procedural configurations that organise waiting as a permanent condition.

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Queues, thresholds, inaccessible buildings, appointments never scheduled, and repeated journeys between the port and the police headquarters form a system in which urban and administrative infrastructures intertwine, producing a continuous suspension. In this context, rights are not revoked but constantly deferred. Time sediments into space and operates as a technique of governance.

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The very notion of a “monumental boulevard” evokes a specific urban genealogy, tracing back to Haussmann’s transformations of nineteenth-century Paris, where the opening of large boulevards — presented as responses to aesthetic and hygienic concerns — also served as mechanisms of control and management of bodies in public space. In continuity with this history, contemporary regeneration processes in the port risk producing further forms of silent displacement, selecting the presences compatible with the new spatial economy and marginalising those who do not fit within it.

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Framed as an operation of connection and enhancement, such transformations are embedded within broader logics of value production and urban attractiveness, where space is reconfigured as an economic resource. Within this process, what does not contribute to its capitalisation tends to be removed, displaced, or rendered invisible.

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The walkshop is further enriched by the contribution of artist Francesca Centonze, whose project for the Biennale interrogates processes of bodily invisibilisation and economic instrumentalisation. Through situated observation and sensory field noting exercises, participants are invited to contribute to the construction of a collective relational cartography.

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Walking is activated as a collective practice capable of rendering these frictions legible, placing in tension the rhetoric of urban valorisation with the lives that remain suspended within its interstices.