The Ghetto in European Perception: From Cities to Bodies

Between 2010 and 2015, the political pressure on European countries reached its peak during the so-called "migrant crisis." At that time, migration was already a highly debated issue due to the permanent population flows from Africa and the Middle East, as well as the silent exodus from the East, due to the collapse of communism and the enlargement of the European Union. Yet it became a more pressing matter following the Arab Spring in 2011. Refugees asking for asylum reached their highest numbers since World War II, and new regulatory frameworks among EU member states became a ground for political negotiations. In the meantime, the world witnessed a number of unprecedented tragedies. In October 2013, three hundred and eighty-six people lost their lives on a boat a few miles from the Lampedusa shore. In April 2015, seven hundred shipwrecked victims were counted in the Sicilian Strait. Further, landed migrants came to face new barriers. Following the first attempts at government aid, some were repatriated, most were temporarily confined in camps, while heated discussions revolved about the shared responsibility of Northern countries concerning the distribution of migrants among member states. The sea interventions, containment strategies, and the strengthening of external borders (alongside the emergence of new internal ones) dominated the transnational debate, impacting a number of national political campaigns.

One clear example is the rise of far-right Italian populism, embodied by Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League, who garnered support through anti-migrant positions and measures, such as closing the ports. Xenophobic hate speech and acts went hand-in-hand with an open affirmation of right-wing policies, which inspired collective engagement on the part of anti-racist activists to counter this trend, in order to provide a voice to new citizens, migrants, and asylum seekers, fostering new areas of inclusivity through art. It was in this context that the project The City Ghettos of Today was conceived by politically engaged artists from different European countries who collaborated in the production of multicultural urban performances with the financial support of the European Commission, under the auspices of the "Creative Europe" initiative.

An interdisciplinary, artist-run, and transnational project, The City Ghettos of Today was organized by theatre and cultural associations from Italy, Poland, France, Finland, and Belgium under the artistic direction of the Italian playwright and director Pietro Floridia and the management of the Polish Strefa Wolnosłowa Foundation. Productions consisted of participatory workshops, meetings, and sitespecific performances that took place in Bologna, Milan, Paris, Warsaw, Antwerp, Berlin, and Helsinki between 2013 and 2015. During the project, artists and researchers from partner units investigated the meaning of the word "ghetto" in European inner-city neighborhoods together with inhabitants recruited through the organizers' engagement with local migrant communities. Beyond the confinement of bodies and groups commonly associated with the term "ghetto," both socioeconomic barriers and the processes of "territorial stigmatization," as described by the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, were considered in alongside urban processes and the participants' own collective and individual narrations. ¹ These matters were then given a theatrical form, moving from improvisation and stage writing to the creation of installations and performances that were, in the end, located at sites in each of the partner cities. These locations included shopping and cultural centers, museums, courtyards of public buildings, and small theatres in both cities and surrounding suburbs.

For each performance, the work developed over several months, both in the street, where testimonies were gathered and forms of ghettoization was observed, and in the rehearsal room. There, social and personal data were read in the light of the master-servant relationship, taking Shakespeare's The Tempest as its main point of reference and catalyst text. The City Ghettos of Today's laboratory consequently became a socialization and empowerment tool for the intergenerational and multicultural participants, yielding and a proving ground for new forms of protest and public awareness through art. Its cultural importance is closely linked to this process that softened—from within—the barriers perceived by participants, giving shape to temporary critical communities that represented the cultural borders dividing the...