EXHIBITION: Terra Infirma
Thursday, March 11, 2027
4:00 pm
This event has passed.
Terra Infirma
The History of Campania Landscapes, Between the Earthquake and Toxic Grounds
11 March - 14 April 2027
Terra Infirma examines the long afterlife of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake and the territorial, political and environmental transformations that followed across Campania. Bringing together sound recordings, aerial and drone photography, archival documents, maps, reports and a searchable database, the exhibition traces a landscape shaped not only by seismic rupture, but by reconstruction, extraction, urbanisation, waste and organised crime.
At 19:34 on 23 November 1980, a broadcast by Radio Alfa 102 in the town of Lioni was interrupted by the deep roar of the earthquake itself. One of the few known audio documents to capture the disaster as it happened, the recording forms a point of departure for the exhibition. In the hours that followed, the station became an emergency frequency, later known as Radio Terremoto, supporting rescue and communication across the devastated region. Almost 3,000 people were killed and around 300,000 displaced.
The vast reconstruction programme that followed radically reshaped towns, infrastructures and landscapes. It also created opportunities for Camorra clans to redirect reconstruction funds through construction, quarrying, earth-moving and real estate. Terra Infirma follows these transformations from the earthquake zone of Irpinia towards the plains between Naples and Caserta, historically celebrated as Campania Felix for their agricultural fertility. Here, quarries, fields, industrial sites, illegal dumping grounds and waste infrastructures reveal another geography of accumulation and disturbance.
Contemporary aerial images encounter this territory from above, while much of the history that has shaped it remains invisible at the surface. Photographs are placed in dialogue with documentary and legal evidence tracing the political, economic and material networks behind the landscape. A searchable database connects places, dates, substances, institutions, infrastructures and legal cases, revealing entanglements between reconstruction economies, waste circulation, environmental contamination and organised crime.
The exhibition also returns to responses that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. In April 1981, Joseph Beuys wrote Alcune richieste e domande sul Palazzo nella testa umana (Some Requests and Questions about the Palace in the Human Head), intended for the Neapolitan newspaper Il Mattino, which ultimately rejected the text as too subversive. Written as a manifesto, it reflected on land, territory and the popolo meridionale, proposing a “third way” beyond capitalism and communism. Revisited here, the text positions the earthquake not only as a natural catastrophe, but as a moment that exposed deeper questions of territory, political power and reconstruction.
Terra Infirma understands the landscape itself as an archive. Fault lines, abandoned quarries, agricultural fields, illegal dumps and waste infrastructures register different forms of disturbance within the same territory. Its title describes a ground unstable in geological, political and material terms: shaken by tectonic forces, but also excavated, built upon, contaminated and repeatedly reorganised. Moving between image, sound, document and data, the exhibition asks how these layered transformations can be made visible and how their traces continue to shape Campania.
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Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
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Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme