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Paper short abstract:

I explore how the future is claimed through the physical absence of materiality. Focusing on how two demolished urban elements are narrativized, I investigate how their absence provides a locus where the contested past and the impossible future are articulated through the affective register.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore how a future is claimed through

absence. I focus on two urban elements –a building and a staircase that

have been demolished– in the city of Latina. Latina was built on

reclaimed marshland by the fascist regime in 1932. After the end of the

regime in 1943, the city underwent important urban changes. Moreover, a

series of internal migrations have turned Latina into a multifarious

place of convergence. The social and spatial heterogeneity, and the

weight of the city’s contested past, contribute heavily to my

interlocutors’ sense of temporal uncertainty. Despite their physical

absence, the building and staircase (both belonging to fascist-era

architecture) are very present in my interlocutors’ narratives. Their

physical absence generates imaginations for alternative (yet impossible)

futures through the affective register and the re-elaboration of the

city’s contested past. The building and staircase become ‘phantom

places’ (Papadopoulou,2016), acquiring a phantomatic presence in my

interlocutors’ experiences of the city’s temporalities. I argue, thus,

that it is precisely their absence –and the affectivities it exudes–

that allows my interlocutors to reframe their sense of place by breaking

‘the rules of history’. I focus, therefore, on the affects exuded by a

place caught between its fascist past, its present urban form, and its

uncertain future. In doing so, I inquire into my interlocutors’ relation

to Latina, at the intersection between absences, affects, materialities,

and temporalities.