Paper short abstract:

I analyse the material presence of a specific building, which has served as a cathartic infrastructural node in the past and today, as a transformative place for different kinds of citizens. I argue that its materiality reveals immaterial state infrastructures and the performance of its power.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides an analysis of Palazzo M ('M Palace'), a building erected in the shape of the letter 'M' in Latina, an Italian city. The evocative alphabetical shape was chosen in honour of Benito Mussolini. The whole town was, in fact, founded by the fascist regime on reclaimed marshland. Until the fall of the regime, the building housed the Casa del Fascio (the local branch of the National Fascist Party). It was, therefore, a pivotal node within the regime's ideological, political, and urban infrastructures of the city. Today, it houses the city's immigration office, even though little has changed in its architectural and aesthetic features. I focus on a common sight during my fieldwork: the long queues of migrants waiting to be admitted in the building. In doing so, I analyse this building as a multitemporal and cathartic infrastructural node, both for the fascist state and the contemporary state. Its materiality concretized state power and the infrastructures through which it was implemented. Today, state power is vicariously displayed through the presence and visibility of the migrants' bodies, as they navigate their (il)legal statuses through the state's bureaucratic infrastructures. By considering what is both (in)visible and what is present/absent, I inquire in this place's material existence as a transformative space, aimed at creating specific kinds of citizens (the fascist citizen then and the legal citizen today), through their passage through immaterial state's infrastructures.