Ararat Centre of Art and Kurdish Culture
initiated by Stalker
in cooperation with the Kurdish community of Campo Boario
Rome, Italy
1999

Campo Boario is a vast industrial complex in the Testaccio area of Rome, built at the end of the 19th century as a slaughterhouse and food processing facility. After the complex ceased production in 1975, the area was left to abandonment, and in 1999, the interdisciplinary collective Stalker began to squat a building of the former Mattatoio slaughterhouse, declaring Piazza Boario as Piazza Kurdistan with the many semi-homeless groups and Kurdish immigrant families that gathered regularly at Campo Boario.

As part of Stalker’s organization of events aimed at increasing dialogue with and about the Kurdish diaspora in Rome, a lunch (“pranzo” in Italian) was prepared together with the migrant community on Piazza Kurdistan. The idea of work, here in the form of cooking and serving, is meant as a spending of time and relay of energies, with a people who are captured in the frozen time-space of statelessness.