“The future is an integral part of struggles for environmental justice, and for this reason the subversive potential of imagination underlies many collective practices.” M. Corongiu, I. Iengo

Why Albanova?

Albanova is the name Mussolini gave in 1927 to the administrative merger of several municipalities within the ancient province of Terra di Lavoro, which once stretched from the lower Caserta area to the northern borders of Molise and Lazio. The establishment of this unified municipality was central to a broader political design of blatant propagandistic nature: it was intended as a clear signal to organized crime, which was expected to resign itself to disappearing from the South to make way for the authority of the State.

Following the dissolution of the municipality in 1946, almost all traces of Albanova in Campania vanished, with the sole exception of the Casal di Principe railway station.

For more than a decade, this word has found a powerful resonance in the artistic practice of Teresa Antignani through tapestries, flags, and banners. This is not simply a matter of recovering a name, but of wresting it from its authoritarian genesis to return it to the territories, binding it inseparably to the memory of collective struggles for social and environmental justice. Albanova is an act of reappropriation.

At the heart of this research lies a cycle of choral textile works created in collaboration with women from various communities across the Mezzogiorno, where sewing assumes a deeply subversive meaning. Antignani’s work draws extensively from the visual vocabulary of the sacred and the popular traditions of the Italian South. The use of processional banners and tapestries is not a purely aesthetic choice, but a strategy for reclaiming the cultural codes of the land.

By adopting the forms of devotion, the artist elevates demands for environmental and social justice to a ritual dimension. Religious iconography is stripped of its dogma and charged with a new civic power: the “saint” becomes the community in struggle, the “prayer” becomes a claim for justice, and the textile work transforms into an object of secular worship that unites people under a shared banner of resistance

The first collective textile work, titled ALBANOVA, is a flag hand-sewn by the women of the artist’s maternal lineage. Created for the community of Taranto, the flag seeks to connect different civil struggles for environmental justice while denouncing the health crisis of populations living in the shadow of the steel giant.

The embroidery depicts an Agnus Dei and directly references a 2022 UN General Assembly declaration that classified the city as a “sacrifice zone“: a contaminated area where vulnerable groups bear a disproportionate burden of health risks and human rights violations.

Albanova has become a standard of struggle, self-determination, and solidarity among territorial movements. It lives and is reactivated each time Teresa re-enacts, through her performative practice, the vehement gesture of waving this symbol.