Le Colonne della Colombo, 2023

A public shooting on Columbus day by Feel Good Cooperative & Pauline Curnier Jardin

Rome, 12th of October 2023 Quartiere EUR, via Cristoforo Colombo

On 12 October 2023, in a performative journey through the urban planning and fascist architecture of EUR and its colonial spectres, the present, the past and a utopian future led the public through a discovery of Via Cristoforo Colombo.
EUR is the result of a fascist urban planning system which was meant to inscribe into the city’s road pattern straight trajectories of expansion toward the Mediterranean Sea, as a symbolic representation of the regime’s colonial project.
On October 12th, a day celebrated in many countries as Columbus Day, such references were poetically and irreverently subverted by Feel Good Cooperative, as a collective and desiring body of more than one hundred people was guided on a performative journey to re-signify those sites of exploitation and power through a polyphony of voices.

(…) our knowledge of Via Cristoforo Colombo is different. We’ve traversed it during long work nights, and we decided to propose our very personal Colombo tale. An obelisk, an unlit fountain, a colonnade, a parking lot, a gas station, a grove, and a convention building—we organized a sequence of small performative stages, brief glimpses into the sex work life on Colombo street, blurring the lines between dreamlike and real dimensions. We selected some spots we knew and some that inspired us at the very moment, populating them with our own myths, symbols, and bodies. We intertwined monumentality and movement, challenging power figurations by boldly flaunting our asses. The same bodies that are usually harassed by the police and forced out of sight. 
We had a permit from the Rome Municipality to occupy public ground by performing–a nice way to hack the possibilities of institutional art, isn’t it?
Feel Good Cooperative

Watch the teaser Le Colonne della Colombo here

Read the Feel Good Cooperative interview Glipses in the Dark

The performance has been co-realized by LOCALES as part of If Body 2023, and Jindřich Chalupecký Society, Prague City Gallery (CZ)
Photos: Angela Scamarcio