The surviving architectural relics of Fascism remain highly contested within South Tyrolean society. Post- and neo-fascist Italian groups, as well as ethnonationalist and identitarian organizations on the German-speaking side, continue to instrumentalize these monuments in support of competing historical narratives. Consequently, the monuments persistently raise questions concerning political culture, collective memory, and the social identity of a region situated between Italy and Austria.
This project seeks to relocate this sensitive discourse from the museum into the public realm, thereby opening it to broader civic engagement. The city's palimpsest-like sites are marked through temporary architectural objects that are periodically activated, interpreted, and recontextualized through public events and artistic interventions.
This understanding of coexistence is extended to the field of public memory. Instead of constructing permanent counter-monuments, the project proposes a pluralistic, participatory, and discursive commemorative practice that challenges symbolic foundations through performative interventions. Sites of memory are conceived not as fixed and linear monuments, but as assemblages of fragments, temporal layers, and social practices that continually reinterpret the past in response to contemporary conditions.
The ephemeral installations address successive waves of migration that have shaped Bolzano: the construction of a Tyrolean identity for the purposes of tourism, the forced labor migration associated with the Fascist Italianization of South Tyrol, and the contemporary reliance on seasonal migrant labor in the region's agricultural economy.