Ritorno al Sud [Return to the South]
Interview with Rita Elvira Adamo, co-founder of la Rivoluzione delle Seppie about living and creating in between London and the Italian South in Calabria
Thank you for being here! We are back from our halfway winter break for the seventh edition of the Atlas newsletter. Here you can find “The Design of Return podcast - seventh episode” about what it means to build a home in between London and the Italian South, in Calabria, through an experimental and collaborative architecture project. I interview Rita Elvira Adamo, co-founder of la Rivoluzione delle Seppie. This episode is recorded in Italian. Someday, with your support, we will work on seeking professional translators to make all Italian episodes available in English and all English episodes available in Italian. Subscribe below to help us get there. In the meantime, here are some key highlights from our conversation.
Our monthly newsletter is free. You can become a paid subscriber to have access to our full content and support our work.
Either way, welcome back. I am so happy you are here!
The tear
At the study of the anterior region of the right thigh, evidence of an area of structural inhomogeneity at the level of the proximal myotendinous junction of the muscle.
A few weeks ago, I tore one of the four muscles that hold my thigh.
It didn’t take much to stop everything.
Standing up too fast from my bidet.
Between me and the world now, there was a small hole. A void.
While the doctor was passing the cold knob of the ultrasound, I saw it. I saw that a tear is made of fibers that break apart.I didn’t know that if they do not heal, the wound turns into a rigid ball of flesh that prevents your body from returning to its usual moves.
All of a sudden, sitting down, standing up, getting out of bed, became all too conscious.
Even if it happened in a very precise spot, all the other muscles around it started aching. It is called “reflex pain”. Something the muscles would activate to prevent you from harming yourself any further.
To not heal it though would have meant being destined to the pain returning in perpetuity, every once in a while.
So I got to it.
I hated my right leg for it. I approached her with fear. Fear of putting my foot down. Fear the pain would just get worse. Fear of breaking the muscle for good. I felt betrayed by her because after two pandemic years, fourteen lockdowns, a blood clot and a pulled back, all I ever wanted was to get out of this perennial winter and enjoy a walk in the spring.
And instead, this happened.
I was in crutches before I even needed to. And I focused on using the parts of my body that were still functioning.
I had to gear up to face an issue, again. I had to skill up to master the issue, again. I had to confront the issue, again.
The tear.
My first tear I was seven years old.
It was the early 80s in Italy. My memories brings me the back wind shield of our Renault Nine. Me standing on the backseat, next to my brother. Too young to realise this was going to become his legacy too.
I see my grandparents wave goodbye from their doorstep. Getting smaller and smaller with the distance.
But my memory was an imprecise one. In my mind, it was daytime while in reality we left at night. Cause my father wanted to make it very difficult for him to look back while driving out, afraid he would change his mind if he did.
We left in a hurry. The confirmation of a teaching job in the Italian North for both my parents came in last minute, and we left Buonalbergo in fifteen days, in the middle of my second year in elementary school.
More tears followed the original one.
First, there were the multiple returns. Every year with my family we would go back to the South and then back to the North three times a year: every Easter, every summer and every Christmas.
Until my grandparents disappeared on the horizon for real.
Then at work, in my career as an expat. Three years in Milan. Tear. Three years in Paris. Tear. Three years in California.
I designed a life of tears cause farewells were the things I knew how to do best. I learned to call myself a “farewell expert”.
My last tear, I was in a cabin the California Redwoods Forest.
It was summer. The woods were dark. The giant sequoias preferred to keep the light all for themselves.
My brother texted me that he was about to return to Buonalbergo that summer. This time to tell his story at a festival in town.
The story of his career as a film maker. On a stage, below the town’s main church.
That night, I cried hysterically.
I didn't know why until I looked in the bathroom mirror, under the fluorescent lights and I heard myself saying “And what about me? What am I doing here?”.
What am I doing here in a land that is not my own? Living a life as if it was an endless network of tears, too thick now to heal it for good.
Instead of mastering the courage to return home, to the original one.
That became the year I returned to Italy.
I live in Milan now, but at that time I took a sabbatical time to return to the South, to immerse myself in that first void of my separation and try to understand. I didn’t know what exactly, but at least I was there.
I didn’t do this by myself. I did it with the excuse of a project I called “The Ithaca project”. It was me and a handful of local entrepreneurs, determined to offer the town ideas to repopulate its land, after a lot of people left.
Me, finally a member of the town in March. Not in the Summer, not at Christmas. But on a regular Wednesday, when nobody expected to see me there.
I needed to immerse myself in the Donatella before the departure. To see her from the eyes of who returns but also from the ones of who stayed. I needed to see, understand and feel even what I could not like about it, and love it anyway.
I felt that this was not just a research project, but the purpose of why I do everything in life. To look and to help others look for a sense of home beyond separation.
The Design of Return Episode # 7 “Return to the South” - Show Notes
This episode was one of the most difficult episode to record for me. The morning we recorded this interview, I remember crying all morning.
Being separated from my South is what determined everything in my life. It’s both a tender and brutal pain, that never really leaves me, it can only transform. It’s the humming of unbelonging I had to learn to rewrite and recompose in my own notes.
I was so agitated to push the upload button, we pushed the publishing date twice.
It felt like it took me an entire life to write it, even if when I actually could sit down it to do it, it took only an hour to jot it all down.
I am grateful for this precious gift, even in its darker meanders. It is what makes me me and helps me meet special people like Rita.
Rita Elvira Adamo is the co-founder of la Rivoluzione delle Seppie, an active group of young international professionals who works in Calabria with a trans-disciplinary approach. Their mission is to build a new community, fuelled by the exchange of knowledge with the aim of building a new model of living in a place temporarily yet continously.
Their project is called Belmondo. It was ideated at the London Metropolitan School in Rita’s architecture research and work group. It lands in its first iteration in the town of Belmonte Calabro and operates through experimental architectural languages of collaboration.
Rita speaks with us from London, where she just submitted the final draft of her Phd. With her we explore what it means to live in-between London and Calabria, why she calls herself “out of scale” and we learn more about Le Seppie and Belmondo.
Home is all the homes we built a memory in to return to
Donatella Caggiano - What does the idea of home mean to you?
Rita Elvira Adamo: What is “home” is an interesting question, both personally and professionally. With La Rivoluzione delle Seppie we are now redefining the idea of home as being many places: the place you were born it, the place you grew up in, the place where you have a memory in, the place where you have built something in, a place you are building now. With the project Belmondo in Belmonte Calabro, we are building a temporary home we can continuously live and return to. None of us is truly from there, not even me that I am from Calabria. But it is by building it and going back to it over and over again that it became home as well.
Donatella Caggiano: Beautiful. It is as if to build a home, it is enough to build a memory.
Rita Elvira Adamo: Exactly.
Donatella Caggiano: You are born in Cosenza and you have been living in London for fourteen years now. How did you idea of idea of home changed?
Rita Elvira Adamo: I don’t have one home, even now. My idea of home is built by movement, by continuing to live in between.
The “Vampire Squid” as a community building method
Donatella Caggiano: You are the co-founder of a project called La Rivoluzione delle Seppie (“The Revolution of the Squid”). Why is the squid the right animal to create the revolution you have in mind?
Rita Elvira Adamo: I don’t know if it’s the right animal. There must be many more that can do many other revolutions. But for us the inspiration comes from a story our architecture professor in London asked us to read all the time: the “Vampire Squid” by Flusser ( you can download the pdf here, courtesy of Rita). It is about this particular kind of squid, apparently even more intelligent than humans, that is blind and lives in the depth of the ocean’s abyss. As it is not able to see and be seen often by other, he learns its way by touch. Which is the right image for the method we apply in the project, which is a learning by doing approach to community building. And also, as it is applied in places at the edge, a little more at the margin of the more social and geographic city centres, which are missing in Calabria (our many city is still Naples, up North), it is inspired to pull them out of the abyss too.
Donatella Caggiano: you describe yourself as someone who lives a life in-between, between London and Calabria. Do you consider Belmondo your project to return home?
Rita Elvira Adamo: Not entirely. It’s more an investment I am doing to support my land and my people. I myself am determined to continue living in between for now. I’ll tell you more. For Belmondo to survive and thrive it is essential that it keeps this movement going, of people that are not from there and travel there to infuse this energy in the town. In 2019 we reached 100 people from all over the world, doubling the population that usually lives there. This contributes to make sure the town can continue return to its centre. Just like it is essential that the creatives, the students, the immigrants, continue to live and travel elsewhere and then return full of inspiration and motivation to continue building. The project would not be the same if we would all live there permanently.
Donatella Caggiano: Do you think you needed the project and your international community as a buffer, to protect you from your return at all?
Rita Elvira Adamo: When I left Calabria the first time I promised myself I would never go back. Even when I used to go back in the summer, I would always do it with friends and never alone. So yes, probably yes.
The first chair
Donatella Caggiano: the first thing you did when you first arrived in Belmonte, was to promote the co-design of a chair as a symbol of community renewal, as a metaphor for change. When you decided to leave Calabria you were eighteen years old. Where and how did you decide to install your first “chair”'?
Rita Elvira Adamo: The chair was conceived together with our architectural partner on the project, Orizzontale. Together we created the minimum viable unit, a simple chair mold made of cardboard, that we could use to teach a diverse group of people, young, old, locals, immigrants how to design different type of chairs in a short amount of time. Nineteen different looking chairs came out of this experiment, even if they all came from the same root.
Donatella Caggiano: Like having one root, but many destinations.
Rita Elvira Adamo: Exactly. And that is also how I approach my choices. I didn’t want to live in Rome when I first left, because it was too close to home. I wanted somewhere where I could find out who I was away from what I already knew of myself. I wanted to leave my insecurity there, I wanted to leave the fact that I could only be the Rita everybody knew and no-one else, I wanted to know who I truly could be. The first time I arrived in London I didn’t know English at all and a boy in the street shouted a compliment at me. I thought it was an insult, cause I wasn’t used to the same thing at home. I have always been too different, too big, too tall, too loud. This is when I understood London was a “neutral” place where I could learn who I was, cause there wasn’t only one standard. Or probably no standards at all.
“Out of scale”
Donatella Caggiano: after you built the chair for the Belmondo project, you continued by fixing a room in the public library. I am now learning to know you a bit better, so I can imagine you in that room, standing taller than the wall. You told me once you have always felt “out of scale”. What does it mean for you?
Rita Elvira Adamo: When I think about myself with some sense of humor, I always think of Alice in Wonderland, when she takes a bite from the mushroom. I am 1 meter and 86 centimetres tall, I have always had kind of a larger figure, maybe not the perfect weight either. You know, these are not average measures that are expected of woman from the Italian South. I have always dreamt of having a smaller figure, even though now I feel better in my own skin even because the world and the media seem readier to welcome people of all shapes and sizes. Which is also the reason why I can have the courage to tell you these things today. It is important for me now. On top of the fact that if I think about it for an architect, to use this idea of “out of scale” to her own advantage can be consider a nice act of courage too.
La “Restanza”, the act of staying
Donatella Caggiano: I know last December you broke an ankle and was “forced” to stay in Calabria more than expected so your in-betweener lifestyle got interrupted for a while. How was your time there?
Rita Elvira Adamo: I got really scared at the beginning. I keep telling myself. “What am I gonna do now? But in reality, it turned out to be an agreeable time. It was years I didn’t spend that amount of time with my family, or even my brother who was back from Rome for a while. It was really enjoyable the feeling that new connections and curiosity could spark even there. My family and I are really close, but Cosenza has always represented my teenage years and the drive to escape. It was a nice feeling to start seeing that with different eyes too.
Donatella Caggiano: did this experience inspire you to say: maybe I can come back here for good?
No. Not yet. Rita in Calabria is only the Belmondo project and her past. Rita in London is many type of Rita. Even someone else I don’t know yet.
-
If you read this newsletter and value it, consider going to the paid version.
One of the perks = community discussion threads, just for subscribers, on Fridays.
If you are a contingent worker or un- or under-employed, just email and I’ll give you a free subscription, no questions asked.
If you’re reading this in your inbox, you can find a shareable version online here. Or share with a friend here.
You can follow us on Instagram here. You can follow me on Instagram here. Feel free to comment below — and you can always reach me at thedesignofreturn@gmail.com