Love, Rage & More Occupations

Originally published in Rehearsing a City for All published by Bruno and edited by Silvia Bottiroli (2025–26).

This morning I showed up for the briefing appointment. Before entering the meeting room, I do like everyone else: I put my phone on airplane mode and lock it in the broom closet to avoid eavesdropping. The closet is full of cell phones: there are so many of us.

In the centre of the room a group of boys consult with each other before taking their markers out of their pockets and tracing the plan of a building on large white sheets: entrances, exits, elevators, neighbouring streets, surveillance points to warn of arrival of a patrol, where the distraction action will be to cover the break-in, where the van passes which brings in the material to barricade inside...

There is determination and efficiency but also a certain tenderness between them, observing it reassures me.

They look up and for a moment they seem lost by the quantity of people who responded to the appeal circulating in underground circuits: even the balconies on the second floor overlooking the atrium are packed with people. A flash of uncertainty crosses their faces: will we be up to the task?

They recover immediately, it’s enough to exchange a look, run a hand through your hair, ask something in your ear, a smile.

They welcomed us to divide us into groups: who will enter to barricade which area of the building, who will take care of the press, who will let undocumented people discreetly enter once we are inside, etc. There are three levels of risk: administrative arrest, criminal arrest, simple identity check. However, let’s try not to get hurt.

I look around and luckily I am not the oldest: a couple of mature allies are docile and attentive to the instructions given by the commando, a group of very competent young women, careful not to give the impression that they enjoy that position of power. There does not seem to me to be complacency in their confidence, but rather a real satisfaction brought about by doing something useful, something collective, something decisive and true, together, in mutual respect and appreciation. The care and pleasure of activism. And of the collective and political dimension of affectivity.

For weeks now, we have been waiting for a moment of unblocking of what is yet another reception crisis in Belgium: hundreds of asylum seekers sleep in tents on the pavements along the canal in the centre of Brussels. They are being shuffled around by the federal institution and the various mayors of the 19 municipalities that make up Brussels in a ballet of responsibilities that leaves them desperately without a solution.

There are still 3,000 asylum seekers sleeping rough. The measures currently proposed by the federal government will have no effect in the short term. Belgium is regularly condemned by various courts for failing to comply with asylum law. More than 50 associations have signed a proposal suggesting numerous possible solutions to the reception crisis, but from the government it is a no-go.

The girls who are organising the occupation today are part of a group of activists facilitating the opening of spaces to house asylum seekers or undocumented non-European workers. This time we aim high: we aim to occupy a federal building destined to become the future national crisis centre, with great symbolic value.

For these solidarity-minded citizens, occupation is certainly a way to give immediate shelter to those who have no roof over their heads, but also to remind them that the crisis is self-inflicted by violent European migration policies and that the shortage of places in the Fedasil centres, the Belgian federal reception agency, must be filled quickly.

A cartography is drawn in my head of self-managed places that have been opened to meet the needs of asylum seekers, angrily substituting themselves for failing public institutions, and that have been swept away by gentrifying violence.

‘We need structural solutions here and now’. On other occasions, activists wore masks with the faces of the Prime Minister, and the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration: ‘The masks are a reminder that it is government members who should have opened new reception places, not us. But until the ministers take responsibility, we will do it for them’. The default situation of the Belgian state is so serious that the furniture of the ministerial offices has been auctioned to pay the European sanctions. Militants participated in these auctions, bought chairs, tables and armchairs with which they provocatively furnished the solidarity squats.

There is enough to commission a performance on the fanta-political ambiguity of institutions, but it is a parasitic thought. This is not about provoking a moment of estrangement but about supporting a very concrete action, in which ordinary citizens take ethical and legal responsibility for doing what the institution seems unwilling or unable to do: caring without over-determining.

The completely wood-panelled hall is reminiscent of a Protestant mountain church, the skylights casting a diagonal slash of light. I find myself getting nervous at the immaculate walls and the 50 chairs arranged in a perfect circle. Luckily, participants in the first session of Scuola Aperta, which aims to be an intergenerational space where activists, high school students and university students can exchange ‘dissident knowledge’ (counter-hegemonic narratives) as equals and without mincing their words, slowly begin to arrive.

Together with the workshops in high schools, the putting up of posters in the city and the planned public performative action, Scuola Aperta is one of the many levels that make up Attrito. It stems from the desire to build a practical-discursive platform that focuses on mutual learning and is open to sharing theory, emotions, experiences and oppressions experienced in the school and out-of-school environment. Attrito – Paesaggio costituente is an artistic trajectory committed to decriminalising the narrative of occupation and enhancing subjective experiences of self-management. It is part of the Fuori! project, which, as part of the European PON-METRO programme aimed at having a social impact / against school drop-out, focuses on the new Bolognese generations. FUORI! is a project by Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, promoted by the Municipality of Bologna (which is also one of ERT's member bodies) and financed by the European Union – European Social Fund within the framework of the Operational Programme Metropolitan Cities 2014–2020 and the Union's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The construction between institutional context and anti-institutional critique is acrobatic enough.

From what position do we invite occupiers and ex-occupiers in a room managed by the municipality to a meeting entitled ‘Indiscipline’ that wants to share antagonistic experiences and tools and practices considered illegal? How can we stay within an institutional context while openly criticising the institution? Which institution are we referring to, the Municipality, the School Board, the University or the National Theatre? How can we establish a climate of trust with the occupiers who suffered the most violent expulsions? How do we avoid attracting the attention of the municipal administration so that it leaves us free to produce radically critical content while at the same time creating a wide-ranging public discussion? And how to do this in a historical context in which Italy’s rare social-democratic institutions have become masters at implementing mechanisms to co-opt antagonist forces, normalise dissent, and promote the privatisation of public goods? Although the ‘Emilia-Romagna model’ pays more attention to certain traits of solidarity and social inclusion, it fits perfectly into the neo-liberal paradigm and Bologna is a city typically enrolled in the European trend of city branding; a medium-small city competing with many others, where the financialisaton of real estate and rental platforms leave the city in a critical state of housing tension. It is also an atypical city on the Italian scene, with an administration that wants to be ‘the most ecological, the most feminist and the most progressive in Italy’. Perhaps not the most commoning. Perhaps not the most accessible.

Obviously the text of the open call didn’t sit well with anyone, neither the ERT press office nor the activists involved, but the dozens of personal phone calls re-established a climate of sufficient trust so that an incredible mix of old anarchists, old autonomists, new accelerationists, first-generation hackers and very young members of the middle student collectives could gather here, university students disillusioned by the promises of a sclerotic system or traumatised by the advances of a well-known professor, decolonial feminists, queer Marxists, young gravediggers trying to make ends meet, roommates of cellars equipped to make ends meet, children of an enlightened bourgeoisie, apprentice surgeons, apprentice witches, navigated and unemployed journalists, and many others.

In the end there were more than 50 of us. A wonderful discussion. We do not document it out of respect for the aforementioned tension between institutional container and counter-institutional content. I still eat my hands because all the quotes that follow rely only on my fallacious memory.

What do we talk about?

We conjure up an affective and living archive of occupation experiences in the Bologna area in which the parallel histories of antagonism create unexpected convergences. What do the resistance to the eviction of the Telecom housing occupation, the mermaids in the swimming pool during the XM eviction, the speeches of the post-Covid student occupations, the TAZ anti-passing garrison, the actions of civil disobedience of XR, the citizens’ committees against a new hypermarket in Cirenaica have in common with the act of liberation of a study room?

These are fundamental moments of manifestation of the political in opposition to politics. They help trigger social transformations and experiment with another idea of citizenship and common goods, understood not only as resources, but also as relational goods, around which a community of reference is generated. Homes, social centres, universities, workplaces, trade unions, theatres, cinemas, offices, schools... Concrete places where new institutions could be imagined and practised, for the care of the person, the work, the community. Spaces that in the newspapers are called ‘misappropriation of private property’ or ‘illegal occupation’.

We realise that a fundamental issue is embedded in the narrative. The discourse functional to the profiteering of cities – in which the public administration often becomes complicit – is structured around buzzwords that are aimed at depoliticising the processes of citizen critique, such as smart cities, inclusive democracy, green sustainability and pink inclusivity. Large public areas are privatised, access to the cultural institution is restricted, but great citizen participation in decision-making is staged. The demonisation of conflict and self-management practices make the common ground even more slippery.

There is a desire to act on language to change the perception of conflictuality.

‘In the newspapers and on TV it always ends up with just the images of the evictions, the bulldozers, the resistance to the police, the damage. And where are the everyday care, the self-managed support desks, the workshops with children, the markets outside the big retailers? They don’t make the news’, Clara.

‘Bho, the occupation is definitely a disruption, and is narrated as a violent act. But perhaps it is society that is violent. Even the term “legality” is a bit strange... That is also a narrative. To be obsessed with wanting to regulate everything is more harmful than constructive. Self-management is a tool that allows communities to administer well what is common. To do it with tenderness’. Mattia, Sabin Institute.

Seen from the inside, occupations are acts of liberation: from precarity, from capitalist exploitation, from a suffocating regulatory system, from a violent family. Although the term liberation is quite ambiguous, if we think of the military rhetoric that ‘occupies a territory to liberate it’. Certainly, the question of violence is twofold. Legitimacy incorporates a lot of violence for a lot of subjects outside the norm, from queer, trans, racialised, undocumented, neurodiverse, precarious people.

Let us then try to shift the discourse. Surely occupation – the right to housing for those who cannot afford one or the right to non-commercial, non-extractivist social spaces – has more to do with legitimacy than legality. In the systemic collapse we are going through, when experiences of self-organised relationality and redistribution of resources appear as wells of fresh water in the desert of neoliberal alienation, we wonder how it is possible to take the institutional luxury of condemning these experiences as antisocial.

The violation of a law that in its ambition to be equal for all excludes many and the resulting repression deepens the crisis of responsibility, legitimacy and trust that institutions are going through.

What then is the legitimate and necessary violence to produce the conditions for a liveable future for all? In this complex ballet of definitions between just and unjust, what is the ‘limit’ (of life, of bodies, of oppression) that we set as the full measure beyond which we have no choice but to rebel? We ask ourselves a lot of questions. What is the limit that opens up other worlds? When is this limit a barrier to be crossed to claim access to denied resources and rights, or when is it a limit we set to protect ourselves from repression, to build alternative within? And when we barricade ourselves to create other possible worlds, are we liberating or creating new enclosures? ‘It is not that you occupy and you are simply on the right side, no. You can be attacked from outside. Maybe by kids as young as you but with a more Arabic name than you, who are fed up with having doors closed in their faces and are now breaking through to get in’. Younes, Salesiani.

I mean, how do we maintain the porous walls, the permeability between inside and outside?

We start barricading the entrances, we have iron bars, a roll of gaffer, bike locks. It is not self-evident to barricade doors in anticipation that the other side will not hesitate to use vans to break them down. I look around imagining Baracus from the A-Team materialising with one of his problem-solving ideas, but next to me passes a dad with a 3-year-old girl at most. He holds her hand and says softly: ‘Here, now let's help this lady tie the sticks’. The timber would be some very heavy pallets and iron doors that I found on the top floor and transported with a lot of effort to here. With the good humour of impossible projects, we set to work. We are joined by several very young students. I have already seen some of them at Ritcs, ERG or Cambre, in one or other of the master’s courses on ‘art and systemic collapse’, ‘transformative practices’ or ‘intersectionality of artistic languages’.

What does art have to do with housing and claim occupations? What research trajectories do these courses open up? Analysing the ethical, political and aesthetic complexity of artistic projects that declare themselves increasingly alien to the logic of the market. Artistic practices that define themselves rather through care, relationship, process, participatory criticism, the prefiguration of alternative models, contact, co-presence, mutual aid.

One brings an extra rope, another reasons about load levers, in short, we eventually manage to block the entrance in a solid enough way to take a break.

I have a cigarette rolled by the most chatty girl and ask her how she ended up here today. She looks at me in amazement and says, ‘After years of studying gender and decolonial theory and feeling powerless as a young artist, I simply realised that all I had to do was start making. Doing. Making art. Or civil disobedience. Or make the alternative. I don’t know, I didn’t understand’.

He explains to me with simplicity that occupying the Bâtiment Fédéral is a way of filling this deadly institution with meaning, and with satisfied needs: a roof, first of all, and bringing the question of reception out of media invisibility and declaring solidarity between disparate subjects (artists, sans papiers, lawyers). But also to imagine that in these offices covered in flag-blue carpeting, that behind these oak desks in whose drawers the drafts of the new migration policies will accumulate, that warming up at these brand-new radiators will be the very people that these migration policies will affect. In short, a work of art on a 1:1 scale.

‘In addition to aesthetics and poetic practices, it is in the ability to bring new political and corporeal performances into the world that writing and composition unfold their full potential, such that they question the existing framework. Gesture, body, public space, as a generative sequence, therefore choreographic, but also political’.

How much prowess in the conception of the project, how much productive mastery, how much experience in the management of the working group, how much communicative refinement, how much care for one’s own comrades will we learn from this day of collective (artistic?) action, of illegal and restorative justice?

This coherence between means and ends appears to me as pure revolutionary bliss: an ideal in which no compromise, and no forcing, no waiting, postponing, negotiating, bureaucracy postpones the solution to a distant tomorrow. No administrative loops, like the one my friends in the Ligue des travailleuses domestiques find themselves in: in order to have the right to housing you have to have a job, but in order to work you need a residence permit, and year after year you grow old waiting for the institution to become porous and receptive to the reality on the ground.

Will we be able to imagine another world than the one the system proposes to us (school, work, art, migration...) and give ourselves very concrete tools to make it happen in time? We learn to collaborate, to take responsibility, to manage tensions, to collectively desire and satisfy this desire between eye contact, touching each other’s hair and whispering in each other’s ears, with tenderness. Growing together with a lot of anger and a lot of love and forging new alliances. I like to think that this is the knowledge that will be needed soon, very soon, in a society in violent collapse.

If the imagination is paralysed by the thought of crisis, the art of autonomy, self-government, and solidarity offer a foothold to the fascist-neoliberal mantra of individualism and normativity.

Whether we are talking about Europe, the art system or schools, social commons are perhaps the most responsible dimension of active citizenship that I know of.

During the discussion, a key part was played by the middle student collectives. 15, 16, 17 year olds who, after psychologically surviving a two-year pandemic, realised that the school was not up to the historical moment: incapable of transforming the loop of institutional violence that in the name of merit and productivity – words that sound quite hollow in the mouth of a minister in the midst of an ecological collapse – sacrifices respect for the person, self-determination, gender choice, cooperation, care, anti-fascism.

‘Teaching means marking within, first of all it is a human relationship. And instead the question of authority is put at the centre, with its ideological tools based on humiliation, merit, hierarchical relationship. We students live in a constant state of psychological unease, performance anxiety and fear of the future. Instead, we would like the school to be in touch with life, with civil society. We would like to learn together with adults how to make a world’. Leonardo, Sabin.

When the student collectives intervene in the various Open School workshops, the room begins to levitate. The harshness of their content, denouncing the anger at being invisible, is expressed in the lightness of their words and the happiness of having practised a constituent alternative together.

‘In a school occupation we grow. Point. We change so much, people in occupation begin to think and ask questions, you grow as a person and above all as a group. The question of growing in responsibility, of taking care of others and knowing that they will take care of you. Because to see 14-, 15-year-old kids doing security in front of the door at night making sure the school is OK, that’s stuff you’re not used to. You take on that responsibility because you care, you do it with people you love and feel supported by, you do it with the drive and the desire, rather than a task assigned to you from above that has to be done: an occupation you built yourself... The groups we normally experience are not safe groups, even the class group is not safe, you always end up a bit segregated, everyone has their own problems, there are micro-groups, too many misunderstandings. If we say that we would like to live every day in the occupation, it is of course hyperbole but it is to say that we from inside the occupation learn to do things that we cannot learn otherwise, like to collaborate. We want to learn how to live differently and then apply it to everyday life. Whatever, I talked a lot, as usual’. Matthias, Sabin.

Someone asks if adults also feel vulnerable, and in the room several heads nod.

Tales emerge of university suicides, work burn-outs, the housing crisis in which many find themselves. But also of hateful situations of abuse and humiliation perpetrated by professors and senior managers. And yes they want a space-time in which they can learn from each other to react collectively. ‘Let us teach each other to transgress a norm that we consider unjust’. Emma, Minghetti.

‘Whatever, it’s easy for you to talk, you still live with your parents. Or you don’t have financial problems. We university students away from home have to work and then there’s the absurd stress of looking for a house. You adults, on the other hand, rent houses on airbnb! Why do you want to make Bologna a place where you cannot stay? We are leaving because we are tired, so tired... I expected a welcome from the university, because I wanted to study, it was a passion, and it became a great inconvenience’. Noemi, Unibo.

At Scuola Aperta there are many young university students and even some officials from institutions. There are urban planners committed to defending public spaces or rare natural areas in the city, anti-gentrification activists, citizens interested in converging against an institution that seems too rigid with creative forces and too soft with investors. Young people and adults who have never committed an offence, but are now moved by a burning desire to do so. Together they conspire to draw a line of critique across school, city government and art institution. With Attrito we attempt an anomalous path of subjectivation, not based on identity but rather on political solidarity and mutual hybridisation. Many values are shared, but the strategies, languages, theoretical and affective references, and forms of desire are different across generations and mutually seductive.

In retrospect, I find the tool provided by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić’s text Toward a Transindividual Self, which sees anti-identity solidarity as the instrument for de-alienation, very useful. The crisis must be collectivised through forms of self-organisation and collaboration between different subjects, explain the authors, whose analysis starts with George Simondon. The social body is an ecosystem in which each individual is only a phase of a complex transformative process, in which one is in mutualistic relationship and co-evolution. It is always a collaborative affair in short. Making space, holding space, transforming together. Constituting alternatives.

It is no coincidence that much reflection on collaborative and instituting practices is produced by art theorists. In recent decades, radical art practices have been attempting to break free from their role as gatekeepers for the elites, from their transcendental vocation, art for art’s sake. They debouch from the limits of the work in order to activate more complex and lasting processes. They re-attach themselves to the territory, expand over time. They ally themselves with (non)communities to prefigure worlds in which power, influence, interdependence and authority can be redistributed, perforated, disassembled and reassembled. They reinvent a sphere of social and political action, sometimes helping to establish new public realms, whether physical or immaterial.

Often, the cultural and artistic centres that support them extract value from this bringing into play of the political and the communal, and virtue signal their role in giving visibility to this multitude of engaged practices, but how willing are they (and the system of power on which they stand) to act within themselves the revolutions they talk about in their programmes? For the various art centres, theatre festivals, publishing houses, and production centres that for years have capitalised on the radical content produced by female artists and activists (decolonial feminism, post-capitalism, ecology, you name it), the time has come to break out of the cognitive dissociation between content and container and to take responsibility for acting out the values they rhetorically embrace, or risk becoming merely an aesthetic decoration functional to the petro-patriarchal-capitalist policies which they organise their critical programmes about.

The self-censorship reactions provoked by Israel’s devastating genocidal campaign are an alarming example. The case of Dokumenta, which went from being an institution promoting experimentation and autonomy to an institute controlling the political content of artistic proposals; the case of David Velasco, the former editor-in-chief of Artforum, who was fired on the spot the day after the publication of a petition calling on the art world to call for a ‘ceasefire’; or that of the Frankfurt Book Fair who cancelled a prize giving ceremony for Palestinian-born and Berlin-based writer Adania Shibli, the reluctant reaction of European institutions that have repeatedly silenced freedom of expression, denounced by various open letters. And the complicit inaction for fear of seeing their funds cut, their partnerships embarrassed, their political cover cracked.

The version of history that sees institutions ‘specifically in the west and in ways redolent of the colonial era-as custodians of power-engaged in depoliticising and neutralising the possibility of political experimentation geared towards another future’ seems to be confirmed. Propositions #10: Instituting Otherwise, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 7 December 2019.

But why then insist on anti-institutional criticism in an institutional context?

If Attrito had aimed at empowering the art institution, it would have been a prime example of failure. ERT may not have even realised what happened to it with the Fuori! festival, and when it realised the transformative potential, it tried to forget about it early on. But Attrito did not have this goal, nor did it want to set up a meta-war to organise the antagonism of its multiple subjectivities towards the educational institution or the city administration. Rather, he wanted to create a more ambiguous space in which to construct imaginaries and cognitive alliances, with a view to a unique 1:1 social movement capable of driving a real emancipatory perspective. Attrito wanted to lay the groundwork elsewhere, attempting to re-politicise the discourse starting from concrete practices, against the rhetoric of pink, green and white washing of a certain city administration. Cities are contested spaces, where notions of public and private are increasingly problematic, and struggles for autonomy are either overtly repressed or co-opted and recycled into capital’s movement to enclose, privatise and devalue life.

In the case of Attrito we wanted to act in an institutional context in order to meet that part of the city that does not set foot in informal spaces. If institutional repression relies on a violent and divisive vocabulary, then we need to create listening spaces where protagonists can meet without the mediation of newspapers or police reports. Obviously this micro-politics is not enough to ward off mutual demonisation or identitarianism, but every now and then bursting social bubbles serves to demystify the rhetoric of fear that is the basis of the crushing of the common (and of fascism).

Friction – constituent landscape, June 2023. In a forgotten grove between a tennis court and a ring road, inhabited by swarms of mosquitoes enraged by the June heat, small rodents, brambles and a few informal people, the various subjectivities of Scuola Aperta see themselves as a landscape in the making and summon the city into a public act in the form of a performative assembly. In this clearing not yet enhanced by some public-private real estate project, they exchange hierarchical positions and attempt a different circulation of speech, power and legitimacy: middle and university students run a very tough, very tender, very constituent town assembly in which various representatives of institutions participate as auditors. The invisible worlds of a city that is too expensive and too white and of a school that can learn a lot from its students are told together with care, solidarity, tenderness and legitimacy. Someone gets the message, goes home and changes everything. Someone forges alliances that continue over time, publishes podcasts, organises meetings, imagines sequels. Someone else opens and closes their ears the time of a performance, and goes back under the covers so that everything remains as before.

It is not a question of basking in the illusion that systemic change can come from within institutions. But neither can we retreat from the achievements of the rule of law and give way to the naturalisation of institutional violence.

In the case of our Federal batiment we confronted the institution because the structural solution must ALSO come from the state if we do not want citizens’ initiatives to compensate for the erosion of public accountability or a social model based on the exploitation of civic solidarity (and the invisibilisation of care) rather than on law to take hold. In this sense, the tug-of-war is still played out on the balance of power we manage to establish in order to open breaches and claim a dignified reception. Obviously we must fight for the institution to learn from the situated intelligence that is produced in the self-help networks. That it learns but does not dare to co-opt. The crux is how to defuse the accumulation of power and redistribute it to those who directly take responsibility for building society from below, from within. The responsibility of coming to terms with a systemic exploitation that has made its fortune on the naturalisation of asymmetries. Democracy is made in ways of being together, in concrete practices, in ways of naming things.

So what happened following the occupation of the batiment Federal? Seen in fast forward, the police tried to enter through the lifts connected to the underground car park, they were driven back by cutting the power line, Cat’s Eyes managed to get hot meals in through an open skylight on the roof, white police vans blocked the doors, solidarity gathered outside the building throughout the night, an ally was pushed to the ground and fractured her shoulder, someone was made to leave because she was suffering from toothache, singing and dancing in the main hall, negotiations began, a couple of toilets became clogged, the occupation was held for more than ten days until an agreement was made before the Justice of the Peace with a guarantee from the Belgian Federal State: Fedasil takeover for the 70 homeless occupants. The ‘Stop crise d'accueil’ collective celebrates but recalls that 3,000 people remain on the streets. Today, in the midst of the Palestinian crisis, and the administration’s bewildering refusal to accommodate single men, in Brussels, city solidarity is once again opening its homes, artistic co-working spaces are reconverting into places of welcome, new generations are pausing their studies to open new occupations and give warmth and support to asylum seekers, and – even in the difficult communication between such different subjects – new trans-individual alliances are being created to say loudly that enough is enough. To be continued, with love and rage and much more.

Notes, Bibliography and Acknowledgements:

Ana Vujanovic and Bojana Cvejic, Toward a Transindividual Self: A study in social dramaturgy, Oslo – Brussels – Zagreb: Oslo National Academy of the Arts – SARMA – Multimedijalni institut, 2022.

Danae Theodoridou uses the term ‘publicing’ to describe artistic processes that construct public space in a radically different way from the smart cities described in urban revitalization programs. These processes are structured according to parameters of duration, locality, speculation and disruption. See: Danae Theodoridou, Publicing: Practicing Democracy Through Performance, Nissos, 2022.

Paul Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi : Le son du monde qui s’écroule, Bernard Grasset, 2022.

Marco Baravalle, L’autunno caldo del curatore, InCommon, Marsilio, 2021.

The fantastic institution, BUDA, 2017.

The fantastic institution #2, Kunstenpunt, 2020.

Ilenia Caleo – ‘Performing art institutions’. Contro l’autonomia dell’estetico, Connessioni Remote, n. 2, 02, 2021.

Propositions #10: Instituting Otherwise, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2019