Insulae (Island)

Trapani, Sicily, Italy ,
2022

Painted for Trap/Festiwall_rg, the diptych titled Insulae(island) was completed in January of 2022, in the neighbourhood of Fontenelle-Milo in Trapani, Sicily.

The work addressed the common issues of public housing in Italy now administered by the Instituto di Case Populari (ICP). Taking it’s title from the ancient Roman architecture known as Insula in latin – the translation meaning literally - Island, can be seen as a reference to this state of isolation.

Photographs by Guido van Helten

Project Details

Project

Insulae (Island)

Location

Trapani, Sicily, Italy

Commissioner

Festiwall, Movimento Cinque Stelle

These ancient constructions were largely tenement style housing blocks in Rome and Pompei and were summed up by the Satirist Poet Juvenal written somewhere between AD 100-127.

But here we inhabit a city supported for the most part by slender props for that is how the bailiff holds up the tottering house, patches up gaping cracks in the old wall, bidding the inmates sleep at ease under a roof ready to tumble about their ears… smoke is pouring out of your third-floor attic, but you know nothing of it; for if the alarm begins in the ground-floor, the last man to burn will be he who has nothing to shelter him from the rain but the tiles, where the gentle doves lay their eggs.¹

In the Researching the modern day neighbourhood of Trapani, community understanding was described in one article as, “Dio si è fermato a Villa Rosina’ (God stops at Villa Rosina.) ² That street described as a dividing line, denotes the area as a no go zone for visitors. The area in faces neglect and stigmatization from the rest of the city and remains isolated as its nickname, the Bronx. The idea was formed therefore to work with the children of the local school through a visual arts workshop centered around their interpretation of Home. Home, or Domus in its latin translation Domus was also the name of the contrasting architectural style in ancient Rome, The Domus however, was reserved for the upper-class private residence.

The childlike illustrations of Domus vs. Insulae expresses the innocence and truth of how a neighbourhood’s youth perceives its understanding of home vs. how it is viewed from the outside.