Staging the Archive Course at Abadir Academy in Catania

The Staging the Archive course at Abadir Academy in Catania, held in 2021, explored archives as active, performative systems rather than inert deposits. Students created immaterial archives of the city through urban observation, resulting in collective guides. Three projects emerged: C-SIDE by Giuseppe Fragapane, Beatrice Pelagatti, and Rosario Sorbello, which used sound to map unobserved city corners via 11 audio tracks on SoundCloud; Catania Mavara by group unosei_seinove, which linked places to Sicilian dialect words inspired by the 1669 eruption; and Sotterranei by Federico Guarnaccia, Silvia Ormanni, Mara Russo, and Nicholas Sabena, which documented the Monumental Cemetery of Catania using drone photography to reveal social hieroglyphs. The course was led by Emilia Giorgi, a critic and curator of contemporary visual arts and architecture, who previously collaborated with MiBACT and the MAXXI museum in Rome.