Nomadic AgroCulture

Beyond the many vegetable gardens, communities gardens, informal and new design projects of sharing gardens that are popping up in every little empty space of Rome, cappers, olives, fig and oranges, rucola, wild spinach, cicory and many others edible products grow spontanously in the fragmented left overs of roman country, survived to sprawl and speculation, just like in the gardens and parks of the city of Rome and in its extended ‘Beyond-City’, an agro-urban mix growing dimension that includes the diversity of all metropolitanized territories from urban to rural to wild natural. Some of those goods grows still from those informal vegetables gardens next to the shacks demolished in the ‘70’s, some others are planted within the istitutional landscape design for new public spaces or urban parks, others are just spontaneuos roaming plants that survive embedded in the tentacoular urbanity. They are not coltivated fruits, vegetables and herbs, we can consider them ‘common goods’ both if they grow in public gardens and parks, or if they grow in private abandoned country land waiting to become edificable.

Starting from 2009, PrimaveraRomana began the AgroCulture Nomadi (Nomadic AgroCulture), a project of collective harvest of public food products. In October 2010 many selforganised groups of people collected public olives with the appropriate tools in different places of the city. 300 kg were collected in the first public harvest which meant 32 liters of good oil, the Olio PU.RO. (Public Oil of Rome). On January 9th, 2011, the harvest of the bitter oranges was organised to produce marmelade as first anniversary and commemoration of the riots happened in Rosarno (South Italy) by the African workers exploited in agriculture and evicted from the village.

The main goal of the practice, a kind of ‘landscape activism’, is the participation and the social cohesion, the sharing of a public space and the caretaking by the inhabitants of the common goods. It is also an active way to experience the city along with a political statement: a way to think about the space around and the way in which it is utilised and can be a source for our food; the possibility of having daily edible fresh products KM 0 or around the corner products.
A googlemap is the sharing tool with which everybody can participate to improve the project: a co-evolutive map that visualises where the edible products are.

Stalker

Stalker is a collective, founded in 1995, that engages in research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city’s margins and forgotten urban space, as well as abandoned areas or regions under transformation that are referred to here as “Actual Territories.”
In May 1999, Stalker squatted the building of the ex-veterinarian in Campo Boario (ex slaughter house) with the Kurdish community of Rome, naming it “Ararat”, in order to explore a new form of contemporary public space, based on acceptance and hospitality. Since 2002 Stalker has been promoting an interdisciplinary research network named Osservatorio Nomade. A net shaped each time around a research and action site, as for Primaveraromana (2009-2010), Suilettidelfiume (2007), Campagnaromana (2006) and Immaginare Corviale (2003 – 2005) in Rome. Along the via Egnatia (2003 – 2004) from Rome to Istanbul, across the Roma world from Rome to the ex-Yugoslavia, with Campus Rom (2008).

Stalker – ON promotes interventions based on the spatial practices of exploration, listening, relation and on creative interactions with the environment, its inhabitants and their “archives of memories”. These processes aim to generate social and environmental relations that are self-organised and evolve over time. The sensitive and dynamic mapping of territories and communities generated through these processes remains easy to access. These interventions promote knowledge sharing, collaborative projects and raise the awareness of communities for their territory and their cultural environment.

About PrimaveraRomana

PrimaveraRomana (primaveraromana.wordpress.com) is a common design project activated by Stalker in order to generate and share social knowledge and awarness on urban changes. By sharing this with more and more people the experience of walking across and mapping the changes of the contemporary roman post urban territories in common, together with social and environmental movements, local communities, associations, researchers and artists, the project aims at searching new practices, poetics and politics of coexistence in the emerging dimension “Beyond-City” for a social change.

www.stalkerlab.org

www.osservatorionomade.net

primaveraromana.wordpress.com