Questo progetto si confronta con il lungo arco di interventi italiani ed occidentali in Palestina: spirituali, politici e simbolici. Dal furto, in epoca crociata, del corpo di San Saba dal monastero di Mar Saba, ai più recenti coinvolgimenti nel turismo culturale e nella diplomazia ecclesiastica, la Terra Santa è stata ripetutamente dirottata sotto l'egida della venerazione. Questi atti, spesso inquadrati come preservazione o pellegrinaggio, hanno funzionato come strumenti di possesso, sottraendo corpi, reliquie e simboli ai loro contesti locali per servire l'immaginario stranicro.
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Il fallimento dell'Europa non è solo storico, ma anche estetico ed etico. Il romanticismo barocco applicato alla regione ha attenuato la violenza dell'occupazione e oscurato le realtà politiche sul campo. Parallelamente, gli Stati Uniti, pur aueggiandosi neutrali, rafforzano questi fallimenti offrendo copertura politica e aiuti militari allo stato sionista, accelerando la cancellazione della vita e della sovranità palestinese. La loro codardia sta nella diplomazia retorica, mentre favoriscono un colonialismo di alta tecnologia.
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In Open بيت الله, queste credità si confrontano non con monumenti di vittoria, ma con frammenti, echi, disallineamenti e rivisitazioni. Non si tratta di un ritorno, né di una restaurazione, ma di uno spostamento deliberato: una messa in scena della presenza di fronte a un'assenza sistemica.
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Mapping
Open بيت الله
Located in Toffia, a small and quiet medieval hilltop village in the middle of Sabina, about 60km NE of Rome, and is hosted within a deconsecrated 13th Century church, 33OC.
1. Outside Intervention
Dichiarazione di conformità
Mounted atop a weathered electrical box at the edge of the village, an old advertisement displays a bright bag of ميسلي chips—its glossy packaging oddly preserved, surrounded by faded handprints and scribbled Arabic names of children who once visited Toffia over a decade ago. A spontaneous archive of touch and snack culture, left to bleach under the Italian sun. The image blends unnoticed into the daily fabric of the town—where the commercial flattens into the communal, and innocence quietly marks its territory.
The accompanying audio is a domestic recording from Palestine: the artist’s family casually discussing the very same chips, while the artist himself eats them into the microphone. The crunch is visceral—piercing, rhythmic, overtaking the conversation. Sound becomes texture. The public display of advertisement is brought into the private, and the private act of eating becomes a public disturbance. This work stages a dissonance between nourishment and noise, memory and marketing.
Audio
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2. Church Steps
Inumidisci la tua bocca con il ricordo di Allah (donna cercasi)
On the Margin of Jerusalem
At the gate of the church, a fracture splits the iron—its contour uncannily outlines the map of Palestine. Beneath it, set into the threshold stone, lies a photograph of the Dome of the Rock: the architectural dome intact, but its sky deliberately removed. This cut sky is not discarded—it reappears inside, taped onto the decommissioned church bell, as if to reclaim the heavens once lost to noise. The viewer must step directly on the dome and on the land—on a sanctity made pedestrian. That same outline of Palestine resurfaces later in the kitchen, carved into local pecorino.
A second image hangs nearby: the outline of a mural fragment, once painted inside this church, now transposed—miraculously or mockingly—onto a red brick wall in Boston. From that same world of echoes, a third photograph appears: a small boat floats on the Nile, part of the Woman Wanted / Donna Cercasi series, adrift in search of presence.
The sound here, Kahraba—recorded from an Egyptian women’s prison—crackles with electric protest. It fills the space where bells once rang.
Audio
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3. Mar Saba Room
Vogliamo Vedere il mar morto
Three photographs anchor the room in layered acts of seeing and being seen.
High on the central wall, nearly unreachable by the eye, a vast image of the golden desert surrounding Mar Saba hangs like a mirage—untouchable, holy, and distant.
On the inside of the door, the artist’s mother appears from behind, standing in a money exchange in Palestine. As a Muslim woman, her presence at Mar Saba is permitted—unlike Christian women, who are still forbidden to enter the monastery. She becomes both exception and witness.
On the outside of the same door, a photograph of a leafless palm tree juts into the barren landscape—reduced to a bare, phallic silhouette. It stands guard between fertility and denial, captioned: “Le donne e le mele non sono benvenute.”
The audio in this room is a raw field recording from the Allenby Bridge, the heavily militarized crossing point from Jordan into the West Bank—an occupied and politicized artery often erased from maps. The recording captures the artist walking through layers of security, metal detectors, and machine hums, sonically tracing the architecture of borders that continue to divide land, bodies, and belief.
Audio
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4. The Nave
Selling the Medina Temple (La vendita del tempio medina)
Where the West Begins (Dove inizia l’occidente)
Monumento alla gamba di sant'anna in Italia
The nave becomes a marketplace of sanctity and spectacle. A discreet QR code on the altar links to Selling the Medina Temple, a speculative catalog of imaginary temples, while framed spreads from Where the West Begins form a mosaic of orientalist fantasies—fragments of geopolitical myth, American tourism ads, and the fetish of empire. Italy, once the navel of Western civilization, now lives off a curated nostalgia: “I was once the empire, I was once the art, I was once the romance.” Rome’s phallic past leaks into the global present, selling sacredness back to its spectators.
At the room’s heart rises Monumento alla gamba di Sant’Anna, a sculptural intervention cast from a vanished mural—neither saintly nor whole, but a prosthetic form mapped across the Italian boot. It recalls the centuries-long exile of Saint Saba’s body to Venice and its 1965 return to Palestine. The monument holds within it the theft of relics, names, and narratives.
A projection of Mesli chips—saturated, crunchy, absurd—casts flickering light into the nave, as if stained glass had gone commercial. Accompanying audio includes ينعن أبوي؟ (Yen’an Abouy / “Damn My Father?!”), a fictional manifesto recorded to enter the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2013. Accepted by artist Beatrice Catanzaro, it layers fragments of Ramallah’s soundscape with the Adhan sung in Italian. Together, these collapse sonic hierarchies—church bells, calls to prayer, national anthems—into a discordant hybrid. The artist’s mesophonia, a sensitivity to ritual clangs, is folded into this refusal of tonal obedience.
Near the window, a baby’s garment printed with a pornographic Roman architectural scene is stuffed with Memoirs of Hadrian. This quiet yet jarring object speaks to how empire dresses innocence—how the softest symbols become carriers of violence, exposure, and the perverse intimacy of imperial control.
Finally, high above, the sky once cut from a photograph of the Dome of the Rock is gently laid over the interior bell—doubling the arc of dome and bell, collapsing prayer into conquest and echoing the unresolved tension between the sacred and the seized.. This subtle gesture binds the floor to the ceiling, the sacred to the spectral, branding conflict as both architecture and echo.
Audio
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5. Cave Studio (Officina Creativa No. 33)
Stampe giapponesi
At the center, an old digital printer—no longer functional but now sanctified—rests beside a large, sun-faded poster of Il mio vicino Totoro, reframed as a relic. Nearby, scattered prints from The Four Non-Western Aliens highlight the Japanese figure among them, building a loose constellation of cultural surveillance, misrecognition, and resistance.
This studio becomes a site of fractured narratives, where displacement and imagination converge. On one wall, Female Wanted—a photograph from the Shatila Camp in Lebanon—frames a highway road sign that offers direction and disappearance in the same breath, confronting viewers with presence, erasure, and the blurred geography of belonging.
Looping Audio in the background is Gay Corruption Fairy Tales No. 1—a 55-minute sonic narrative recorded in Nashville—where personal myth, queer coding, and national fantasies collide.
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6. Kitchen
Ai margini di Roma
On the kitchen balcony, photographs from On the Margins of Jerusalem (2014) quietly face outward—marking the threshold between inside and edge, Rome and elsewhere.
A conceptual homage to Joseph Kosuth unfolds through Toffia’s local pecorino: two aged cheeses, each photographed at 48 hours, sit beside their living counterparts on the table. Four framed definitions accompany them—one from the Italian dictionary, one by local cheesemakers, one likening the cheese to Santa Anna’s leg, and one to Palestine.
Passersby are invited to sing the texts aloud, turning the act of definition into ritual.
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7. Archivo / Bedroom
Prompted by the artist’s mother—“Go to Italy and learn two Italian artists each day”—this room becomes an intimate archive of inheritance, fandom, and soft resistance.
Custom-labeled T-shirts hang in the closet, including one nodding to Abbraccia Roma and Achille Lauro – Viaggio nel Terrore, turning pop culture into a site of branding conflict. Torn pages from Memoirs of Hadrian, inscribed with participants’ favorite Italian artists, layer queer memory and shared authorship over classical legacy—including Beatrice Catanzaro, the Italian artist who once accepted the artist into a visual art program in Palestine.
During Cinema Queer Palestinese, visitors selected old Toffian ID cards—inhabiting another identity, another past. The archive unfolds slowly, tracing disidentification and imagined kinship. A few olive branches, hijacked from Hadrian’s Villa, rest without ceremony.
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8. Tower
Nascondere il sole (Viaggio nel terrore)
The sun that once bleached the church’s mural now becomes its spectral author. A “miraculous” light source is tracked—its rays reinterpreted as agents of both disappearance and resurrection. Photographs document the mural’s ghostly reappearance, transposed not on plaster, but across the artist’s apartment wall in Boston—through the window, through memory, through haunting.
A dark image taken from inside the confession room of San Saba in Rome anchors the descent.
Audiovisual: Viaggio nel terrore
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