Silvia Susanna

Supervisor

Abstract

The matter of cultural heritage

Since when has a cultural value been defined as such, and for what purposes? Who validates a cultural value, and according to what criteria? Who earns a place in the chronicles of cultural heritage, and for what reasons? Whose narratives are acknowledged, remembered, and preserved in the national collective memory, while others fade into obscurity? What if the process of decay and damage is inherently tied to the colonial history of the deteriorating building materials? Why can some materials be removed, but others cannot? How does a critical approach fit within the knowledge of preservation of the original, particularly in the context of fascist and nazi architecture? How should a critical approach materialize?

This research project revolves around these questions and is grounded in the analysis and comparison of two difficult heritage sites. The first is Borgo Rizza, a fascist rural village built by the Entity of Colonisation of the Sicilian Latifundia, located in Sicily, Italy. The second is Saalecker Werkstätten, one of the earliest projects by Nazi ideologist and architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, situated in the Burgenlandkreis district of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.

The research aims to document the colonial rhetoric embedded in the preservation protocols using matter as a witness (Schuppli, S., 2020). By matter, I refer to tangible materiality, the extraction and procurement processes used to form, use and assemble them, as well as the construction methods and the corresponding labor distribution. This project proposes to diffract and entangle (Barad, K., 2007) the interplay between modern constructs/assemblages of memory, matter, value, meaning, and Western regimes of visibility to expose the social, ecological and political material implications obscured by preservation rhetoric.

The project originates from reflections developed within the frameworks of the Decolonising Architecture Advanced Studies course, specifically through the Difficult Heritage Summer School led by Alessandro Petti, Emilio Distretti, and Sandi Hilal, as well as the dieDAS – Design Akademie Saaleck's Monumental Affair program, directed by Germane Barnes.

Bio

Silvia Susanna is an architect and researcher. She holds a BA in Architecture and Construction Techniques and an MA in Urban and Architectural Design from La Sapienza, Rome, Italy. She also obtained a short-term diploma in Filmmaking from the New York Film Academy in New York City, USA, funded by TornoSubito Grant. In 2022 she completed a Postmaster’s degree in Decolonizing Architecture led by Alessandro Petti and Marie-Louise Richards at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. Her practice intersects critical-oriented approaches, community-driven projects, and counter-narratives. Her work aims at challenging Western assumptions, questioning established norms contributing to the reproduction of social injustice, and environmentally harmful spatial conditions. Currently, she focuses on the interactions between discourses and practice in the context of heritage preservation; particularly, she is exploring the relationship between cultural value, memory and matter. Her work has been exhibited in various spaces, including Ground in Stockholm, Sweden (2022), “NòtFilmFest” in Italy (2020); Avalanche Art Space in Massachusetts, USA (2020). This year, she has been an artist in residency at IASPIS (Swedish Arts Grants international program for visual and applied arts) where she continued her research on material decay at Borgo Rizza (Sicily, Italy) and the paradoxes in Italy’s Authorized Heritage Discourse. In parallel, she started a comparative analysis with the Saalecker Werkstätten (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany), an architectural site tied to the legacy of racist ideologist Paul Schultze Naumburg, where she has recently conducted an art project as a fellow of dieDAS – Design Akademie Saaleck in the program Monumental Affair led by Germane Barnes. Susanna has contributed to major international exhibitions as an assistant curator for the Slovenian Presentation [Home at Arsenale] at the Venice Biennale in 2016 and as an architect assistant for the Tunisian Pavilion in 2017, as well as for Maruša Zorec in 2018.