POST DISASTER (Gabriele Leo, Gabriella Mastrangelo, Grazia Mappa, Peppe Frisino) is an interdisciplinary collective whose practice intersects spatial, performative and curatorial actions. Their research uses the metaphor of disaster as a local lens to investigate territories in relation to global dynamics and tensions.
In 2018 they started POST DISASTER ROOFTOPS, a long term project staged on the rooftops of Taranto, an industrial city in southern Italy that is going through a long-term environmental, social and economic crisis.. Through the lens of the city, the practice-based investigation addresses the role of extraction/production processes in relation to a wider mediterranean context.
Their work has been awarded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and presented at major cultural, artistic, and academic institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Triennale Milano, Malta Art Biennale, Museion Bolzano, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, PACT Zollverein. From 2025 Post Disaster they are associated artists of the European platform IN SITU.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Suspended Deindustrialization is a participatory research-creation project exploring how local communities experience and negotiate toxic legacies in a territory marked by a prolonged condition of suspended deindustrialization. Building on Post Disaster’s long-term engagement with Taranto – an industrial city in Southern Italy recently designated as a “sacrifice zone” by a U.N. human rights report – the project combines collective walks, workshops, oral histories, and spatial dramaturgy into a site-specific ecoperformance co-designed with local associations and anthropologist Jasmine Pisapia (P.I. of the project Ecologies of Performance: Multimodal Ethnographies of Environmental Violence and Embodied Resistance in Southern Italy at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia). Through artistic experimentation and community-based research, the project will develop an itinerant collective ritual along the outskirts of a neighborhood marked by industrial pollution, aiming to (re)connect the area with its surrounding waterscapes. To echo the shared conditions of industrialization and environmental fragility between two distinct territories – while engaging the larger DePOT research community – a second phase of the project will take place in Marghera, Venice, where documentary materials recorded in Taranto will be shared across key community venues.
