AS WE BUILT NO BARRICADES
Solo show curated by Roberto Lacarbonara and Aurora Lacirignola.
The Zone
Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce, Via G. Libertini 3, Lecce 73100
2026.01.30 - 02.28
Opening 2026.01.30, 11:00
Presenting AS WE BUILT NO BARRICADES. Third act: Lecce, a new series of images created inside the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce.
Curatorial text written by Elena Roccaro: The construction of a barricade marks the passage from everyday routine to a radical suspension: a gesture that interrupts what is taken for granted and throws it into crisis. Its use serves to compensate for the demonstrators’ inferior position in terms of organization and equipment. Yet more significant than physical protection is its psychological dimension: the possibility of retreating in case of emergency strengthens the demonstrators’ morale.
As Mark Traugott writes in The Insurgent Barricade (2010), one of the barricade’s most relevant functions is its “selective permeability”: it prevents the entry of undesirables while allowing allies to pass through. The barricade does not merely divide existing physical space; it simultaneously creates a social space for gathering.
AS WE BUILT NO BARRICADES proposes an imaginative dimension through which the artist investigates the theme of the aestheticization of dissent, looking to visual fabulation as a possible tool of struggle. Here too, barricades emerge from stratification and assemblage – they act like reconstructed skin, like the healing of a tissue: they do not erase the wound but make it visible as a scar, attempting to render it inhabitable.
In this new part of the project, realized within the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce, the barricade is inserted into the spaces of the former Convent as an invitation to stasis, waiting, observation, and inner dialogue. The barricade defines itself both as a wall and as a symptom on the skin and, like skin, it has an inside and an outside. It is not an architecture designed against those who wish to inhabit it, but against those who impose a single way of inhabiting.