Gymnasium
The season of “clearing outs” in Rome began in 2015. Spaces occupied by social and cultural activities, as well as buildings hosting refugees, were cleared out without offering any alternative.
Under Francesco Rutelli’s administration, a resolution (no. 26 of 1995) was enacted, legitimising the social and cultural importance of these spaces and granting regulated rents that would recognize the social value of each and every experience.
Once Ignazio Marino became mayor, a new resolution was enacted (no. 140 of 2015), aimed at reclaiming, putting on the market via public tender and forcing to pay all those spaces that had been previously authorised by the Municipality through a regulated lease contract that had become defaulting and yet were being “currently used for a number of different purposes, also of a commercial and residential nature”.
What happened, however, is that albeit neither Marino nor special commissioner Tronca issued a set of rules, all documents quickly landed on the table of the Regional Public Prosecutor's Office for the Court of Auditors that carried out its investigations (verifying who was occupying what regardless of why and how) and ordered the Municipality to clear out those spaces.
Two years later, the emergency continues: under the new administration, headed by mayor Virgina Raggi, the situation did not change and the clearing outs forged ahead.
The People’s Gym of San Lorenzo is one of these spaces awaiting regularisation.
Gymnasium is a project on a reconstructed space. An old canteen in San Lorenzo suburb turned gym more than 10 years ago. An urban space saved from decline.
A space that became something else. The experience of a group of people who renegotiated the very concept of “place”.
Through the relationship between body, object and place, Gymnasium shows the re-appropriation of a space. The athletic gesture is lost, suspended, it turns into abstraction. A space that is both open and closed, a place where everything is transient, even the gym itself.
It does not show the gym with its chaotic and exuberant movement, but how to claim back a way of life and the human capacity to restore meaning to things: to occupy, to resist through sport and to move forward while standing firmly on nothing but ideas. Probably an utopia, at the very least an ambition.