Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic account of how the constant redrawing of the boundaries between art, activism and ethnicity ensure the continuing viability of a utopian project in a Roman squat.

Paper long abstract:

A former salami factory in the outskirts of Rome, Metropoliz was squatted by B.P.M. (blocchi precari metropolitani) activists in 2009. It is currently home to a multi-ethnic population of about 200 people. Since 2012 Metropoliz is also an art museum (Maam) where avant-garde artists can exhibit their work and in the process contribute to its ongoing renovation.

Hence, Metropoliz is a multi-dimensional space where migrants, artists and activists are daily experiencing the challenges of cultural translation. Though all parties involved explicitly frame their respective engagement with each other in terms of meticciato (cultural hybridity), they are constantly confronted with the daunting task of negotiating their potentially diverging life projects: the inhabitants', for whom Metropoliz is their home (the haven of intimacy) and the site of their empowerment; the activists', for whom the squat represents their enduring struggle against neo-liberalism and the site where their militant practice is questioned by what they feel to be an elitist intrusion on the part of the artists; the Maam's "curators", whose project to collapse the boundaries separating art and everyday life needs to be constantly renegotiated to accommodate the residents' intimacy and the activists' militancy.

Based on my on-going ethnographic fieldwork, my paper draws from Pierre Bourdieu and interprets such three-party conversation as the coming together of three fields. With reference to Jacques Rancière notion of disagreement, I argue that the continuing viability of Metropoliz as utopian experiment is ensured by the tensions, misunderstandings and ambiguities that haunt it.