Infernetto: A Story of Ordinary Urban Madness with Valentina Parisi
23.11.2021, 9:00 pm
Lab27 is pleased to announce, as part of the collateral activities of the exhibition “Abitare lo stigma” (Living the Stigma), the sixteenth edition of INCONTRI DI FOTOGRAFIA, which will take place on Tuesday, November 23 at 9:00 PM, streamed live on Lab27’s YouTube channel with Valentina Parisi and her project Infernetto.
The project began in 2018 with the aim of telling the story of an urban area of Rome: the Infernetto. Walking through this neighborhood evokes contrasting feelings. The landscape is captivating for its diversity, yet suddenly it becomes uniform and orderly. Even the name suggests that this is not exactly a peaceful place! About half of its 1,000 hectares were occupied by spontaneously built structures. In the late 1950s, the pioneers of the Infernetto began buying agricultural land on which they started building their homes. Most were people who could not afford a house and had either heard about the area or discovered it while returning from the seaside near Ostia, searching for a place to relax in the shade of cork oak trees.
Infernetto is a border zone, adjacent to the Presidential Estate of Castel Porziano, 20 km from Rome, along the Via Cristoforo Colombo highway, which connects the city center to the coast. Until the 1970s, living there meant existing without basic services: no electricity, no sewer connections, no streets, and no schools. The area consisted of barren land with scattered rural houses and fields unsuitable for cultivation, as the entire region was—and still is—prone to hydrogeological risks.
Thanks to their desire to build a life immersed in nature—being next to the Castel Porziano Nature Reserve—the first inhabitants developed a strong sense of community and identity, which allowed them to build the first roads and advocate for the construction of the first schools. Today, Infernetto is a residential neighborhood with over 40,000 inhabitants. It is more orderly than before (at least in some areas), but the urbanization process is far from complete. In 1994, the Municipality of Rome prepared a master plan for the area, but urban development never began. There are still no schools, roads, healthcare facilities, libraries, or public meeting places. Municipal administrations have increased building density through construction compensations—in other words, selling cubic meters of land to developers. This has driven up land and housing costs, fueling labor exploitation and illegal trade.
Infernetto, which once hosted Abdullah Öcalan under global intelligence surveillance, has completely lost its original character due to an urban planning frenzy that separates and divides. Policies do not involve residents; they sell, speculate, and transform agricultural, natural, and social landscapes into stagnant spaces. Construction sites, apparently abandoned land, closed houses, walls and fences, vegetation reclaiming every available space, new-generation buildings, cork trees at intersections, decay away from villas, no sidewalks, horses in gardens, sheep grazing, speeding cars, and very few pedestrians—this is the everyday reality.
It is easy to lose one’s sense of orientation in Infernetto because landmarks no longer exist; everything has been designed around cars. Today, even those born there struggle to identify with the territory and navigate it.
Valentina Parisi was born in Rome, where she graduated from a film and television high school with a specialization in photography and later earned a degree in Humanities with a specialization in Geography. Her work always takes an interdisciplinary approach. Photography is one of the means through which she expresses her vision of often anthropized landscapes.
Her latest project, Infernetto, was created as a self-produced fanzine and presented in 2019 by LeporelloBooks in Rome. She has participated in several book-making workshops with Israel Ariño, Avarie Publishing, and CESURALAB, all of which have shown interest in her long-term projects. Valentina develops themes that come to fruition after years of research and experimentation. She is not particularly interested in portraiture; therefore, the anthropological aspect in her work is expressed through actions and transformations of space.
She collaborates with various associations and NGOs working with physical and mental disabilities, offering educational pathways in which photography becomes a tool to define oneself and one’s relationship with others. She has devoted many years to autobiographical projects, such as Black is a Color, exhibited at the Fotoleggendo Festival in Rome and winner of the Portfolio Project organized by Galleria Gallerati.
Her curiosity and attention to social issues have led her to collaborate with the International Women’s House and with performance artists such as Claudia Padoan and Iginio De Luca. Some of her works have been published in various online magazines, and some have been selected by the Osservatorio Nazionale – Fotografia Femminile for inclusion in their catalog. She is currently working on a traveling project featuring a pinhole camera and a mobile darkroom.
Infernetto: A Story of Ordinary Urban Madness with Valentina Parisi
23.11.2021, 9:00 pm
Lab27 is pleased to announce, as part of the collateral activities of the exhibition “Abitare lo stigma” (Living the Stigma), the sixteenth edition of INCONTRI DI FOTOGRAFIA, which will take place on Tuesday, November 23 at 9:00 PM, streamed live on Lab27’s YouTube channel with Valentina Parisi and her project Infernetto.
The project began in 2018 with the aim of telling the story of an urban area of Rome: the Infernetto. Walking through this neighborhood evokes contrasting feelings. The landscape is captivating for its diversity, yet suddenly it becomes uniform and orderly. Even the name suggests that this is not exactly a peaceful place! About half of its 1,000 hectares were occupied by spontaneously built structures. In the late 1950s, the pioneers of the Infernetto began buying agricultural land on which they started building their homes. Most were people who could not afford a house and had either heard about the area or discovered it while returning from the seaside near Ostia, searching for a place to relax in the shade of cork oak trees.
Infernetto is a border zone, adjacent to the Presidential Estate of Castel Porziano, 20 km from Rome, along the Via Cristoforo Colombo highway, which connects the city center to the coast. Until the 1970s, living there meant existing without basic services: no electricity, no sewer connections, no streets, and no schools. The area consisted of barren land with scattered rural houses and fields unsuitable for cultivation, as the entire region was—and still is—prone to hydrogeological risks.
Thanks to their desire to build a life immersed in nature—being next to the Castel Porziano Nature Reserve—the first inhabitants developed a strong sense of community and identity, which allowed them to build the first roads and advocate for the construction of the first schools. Today, Infernetto is a residential neighborhood with over 40,000 inhabitants. It is more orderly than before (at least in some areas), but the urbanization process is far from complete. In 1994, the Municipality of Rome prepared a master plan for the area, but urban development never began. There are still no schools, roads, healthcare facilities, libraries, or public meeting places. Municipal administrations have increased building density through construction compensations—in other words, selling cubic meters of land to developers. This has driven up land and housing costs, fueling labor exploitation and illegal trade.
Infernetto, which once hosted Abdullah Öcalan under global intelligence surveillance, has completely lost its original character due to an urban planning frenzy that separates and divides. Policies do not involve residents; they sell, speculate, and transform agricultural, natural, and social landscapes into stagnant spaces. Construction sites, apparently abandoned land, closed houses, walls and fences, vegetation reclaiming every available space, new-generation buildings, cork trees at intersections, decay away from villas, no sidewalks, horses in gardens, sheep grazing, speeding cars, and very few pedestrians—this is the everyday reality.
It is easy to lose one’s sense of orientation in Infernetto because landmarks no longer exist; everything has been designed around cars. Today, even those born there struggle to identify with the territory and navigate it.
Valentina Parisi was born in Rome, where she graduated from a film and television high school with a specialization in photography and later earned a degree in Humanities with a specialization in Geography. Her work always takes an interdisciplinary approach. Photography is one of the means through which she expresses her vision of often anthropized landscapes.
Her latest project, Infernetto, was created as a self-produced fanzine and presented in 2019 by LeporelloBooks in Rome. She has participated in several book-making workshops with Israel Ariño, Avarie Publishing, and CESURALAB, all of which have shown interest in her long-term projects. Valentina develops themes that come to fruition after years of research and experimentation. She is not particularly interested in portraiture; therefore, the anthropological aspect in her work is expressed through actions and transformations of space.
She collaborates with various associations and NGOs working with physical and mental disabilities, offering educational pathways in which photography becomes a tool to define oneself and one’s relationship with others. She has devoted many years to autobiographical projects, such as Black is a Color, exhibited at the Fotoleggendo Festival in Rome and winner of the Portfolio Project organized by Galleria Gallerati.
Her curiosity and attention to social issues have led her to collaborate with the International Women’s House and with performance artists such as Claudia Padoan and Iginio De Luca. Some of her works have been published in various online magazines, and some have been selected by the Osservatorio Nazionale – Fotografia Femminile for inclusion in their catalog. She is currently working on a traveling project featuring a pinhole camera and a mobile darkroom.
