(re)adjusted territories : aberrant conditions, Napoli etc …
Three hundred years ago Napoli was the southernmost end point of a Grand Tour of France and Italy undertaken by the wealthy and educated English aristocracy chasing the origins of western civilisation.
Missing from the itinerary and the Grand Tourists’ documentation is the in-between … the untidy, non-conforming reality of one of Europe’s most densely populated cities. A city of dark reputation … considered unfathomable and twisted even before the Camorra … always culturally on the edge of Europe … established in a volcanic landscape by the sea that is simultaneously terrible and benign … volatile, unpredictable, fertile, strategically desirable, hot and strange … where ‘aberrant conditions’ are the norm.
Napoli has lived with the fact of instability for centuries. It is undeniably layered, unstable, entangled, contradictory … an accumulation of violent disruption, of ordinary contingencies and accommodations, of exquisite aspirations and extremes of making-do.
(RE)ADJUSTED TERRITORIES 