Suspended Time for L’ABCI: co-design and site-specific exhibition as a trigger for the reactivation process of a confiscated asset

This contribution presents the account of an exhibit design experience developed within a “hybrid” and transdisciplinary context of research and teaching, aimed at defining tools, methods, and co- design strategies to reveal places which, after a long period of opacity, become accessible again, turning into opportunities for inclusion, storytelling, and the sharing of histories and values. Suspended Time is a site-specific exhibition, the outcome of a workshop, set inside a property confiscated from organized crime in the city of Naples. The property, which will be managed on a temporary basis by DiARC after nearly twenty years of abandonment since its confiscation, will be returned to the community as a space for cultural and social experimentation. The exhibition represents the first action of DiARC’s project, L’ABCI. Bene Confiscato in Transizione: Laboratorio socio-culturale di co-esplorazione territoriale, which involves collaboration with various local actors. Through both material and digital artifacts, the exhibition explores the concept of suspended time in waiting: collective or intimate forms of waiting – for justice, freedom, healing, transformation, and regeneration. Each installation conveys an emotional perception of time understood as a transition between different conditions, free of judgment, yet imbued with empathy and hope. L’ABCI occupies the ground floor and two basement spaces, confiscated for around twenty years, located within Palazzo De Liguoro, a sixteenth-century building. The area surrounding the building is of remarkable historical interest; some of the installations highlight its architectural and historical value, evoking the nearby Greek-Roman defensive fortifications, once part of the Neapolis city walls, as well as the ancient aqueduct. The aim is to recount the actions, methodologies, and languages experimented with throughout the process of reappropriation, in which body, testimony, memory, and action have contributed to unveiling the possibility of giving back to the community a once-denied and invisible place – opening it to the writing of new stories, the sharing of new values, and the construction of new relationships within a space to be re-signified.