PERIFERIE. Questions from the Margins. Curated by Martina Maccianti, the series takes the periphery as a key lens through which to read the present. Across five monthly evening events, the program looks at peripheral spaces as sites where imaginaries and desires are produced, and where languages emerge that are capable of challenging the center and its dominant narratives.
Through five guiding questions, each introducing the theme and guests of the evening, the series starts from the premise that today our understanding of the world unfolds through a plurality of languages and codes, and that it is precisely in the peripheries—both material and symbolic—that these languages become more visible and more radical. It is within these marginalized spaces that stigma and mechanisms of exclusion accumulate, but also where practices of resistance and new forms of belonging and collective imagination emerge.
Each event is conceived as a space of passage between discourse and sensory experience. The evening begins at 7:00 pm with a convivial moment accompanied by a musical selection at the Cargo Bar/Bistrot, followed by an open and as horizontal as possible dialogue around a book. The event concludes at the Cinema Centro Pecci with a dedicated film screening. This rhythm leads the audience away from the linearity of debate into a space of friction, where the film each time expands the text, contradicts it, or destabilizes it.
PERIFERIE becomes a transversal field of inquiry that addresses themes often reduced to headlines or slogans: racism and representation, bodies and desire, labor and invisibility, ecologies of living, subcultures, communities, and non-normative forms of life.
All events (talk and screening) have free admission, subject to availability.
March 25 — Peripheries, Fear, Imaginaries
Who has the right to be represented as complex, and who is instead reduced to a figure of alarm?
Guests: Gabriel Seroussi, Fatima El Mouh
Book: La periferia vi guarda con odio. Come nasce la fobia dei maranza (Agenzia X)
Film: Les Misérables by Ladj Ly (2019)
April 8 — Bodies, Care and Practices of Resistance
Can care, understanding, and community transform lives and create relations of support beyond stigma?
Guests: CAT Cooperativa Sociale, Wish Parade Firenze, Tobia D’Onofrio
Book: Guida Stupefacente (Agenzia X)
Film: Toxic Love by Claudio Caligari (1983)
April 22 — Desire, Guilt, Power
When desire becomes language, what does it put into crisis: ourselves, or the rules that shape us?
Guests: Alice Scornajenghi, Alice Minervini
Book: Atti puri (NERO Editions)
Film: Dogs Don’t Wear Pants by Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää (2019)
May 20 — Rave, Underground, Languages from Below
What happens when a language emerges in order not to be translated?
Guests: Ana Nitu, Ima De Franceschi
Book: Incognita K (Agenzia X)
Film: Roma Illegale by Andrea Scarcella
June 24 — Bodies, Species, Norms
Who decides what is natural, and for what political purpose does this definition serve?
Guests: Dario Alì, Arianna Iodice
Book: Natura contronatura (Meltemi)
Film: Orlando, My Political Biography by Paul B. Preciado (2023)
The series is part of Dispacci, the Centro Pecci program dedicated to exploring the present through talks, conversations, and screenings that bring together artistic practices, critical research, and contemporary imaginaries.