“"A Flag Only Needs the Wind"
In Bagnoli, there was supposed to be a flag—a collective textile artwork from the "Albanova" series.
The project was born within the broader context of MEDSAIL, in collaboration with Collettivo Zero and promoted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Naples Federico II.
This institutional framework is a crucial element. During the participatory process, a profound friction emerged: the political reclamation by the women of Bagnoli, who refused to participate in a project promoted by a university department that they saw as compromised by the ongoing exploitation of their land. It is yet another wound, yet another institutional betrayal in a place devastated by heavy industry, which has ultimately been turned into a concrete platform poured over a landfill of poisons and heavy metals.
Bagnoli will not get the promised sea, nor the park envisioned by the people who live there. The landfill (1.5 million cubic meters of steelworks slag) will first host the 2027 America's Cup before being transformed into a harbor for the wealthy and tourists.
This artwork positions itself firmly alongside the Bagnoli community.
Following this refusal, I decided to draft a manifesto alongside the women of Bagnoli and local grassroots movements to make this stance clear.
And so, on July 5, 2026, the engraved flagpole appeared in Piazza a Mare. The statement was read by curator Andrea Pastore; I chose not to be present at the inaugural event.
"A Flag Only Needs the Wind" is a work that speaks of absence, failed negotiation, and political resistance. The empty flagpole becomes a marker of institutional absence.
This piece represents one of the most painful yet beautiful milestones of my journey: it is precisely in moments of crisis that we find new allies. The Bagnoli flag will be created by me, together with the extraordinary women who have accompanied me on this journey of growth and confrontation.
A FLAG ONLY NEEDS THE WIND
Of a flag today, only an empty flagpole can be tangibly manifested.
It was not a matter of impossibility: non-participation in a collective process is a radical stance that cannot remain silent, especially when the choice is made by free women.
Wounded bodies, consciences, and territories utilize every possible arena, even that of absence, to enact conflict. Bagnoli is in struggle. It always has been.
Ever since it was denied its sea due to the presence of heavy metals; ever since it was denied air soaked in asbestos;
ever since they decided to steal hectares of its land to build a harbor for the wealthy—attempting in this way to destroy and annihilate even the very desire to imagine a territory finally returned to the community. Without piles of slag and hazardous waste.
What was supposed to be a coastal restoration project is currently turning into a gray pour of sealed soil, thus representing yet another betrayed promise. From the earliest workers' demands to the self-determination that characterizes the movements' intentions, Bagnoli seems to be crossed by a plurality of voices shouting together: "we want bread, and roses too."
The America's Cup, the management of Invitalia, Manfredi's handshakes with Meloni, and Bennato's anthems represent the face of a system that will implode on itself. This flag will not fly today—not under these conditions, not alongside millions of cubic meters of pollutants, not in a territory ruled by the lords of profit, not within a community deceived once again by its headless representatives, not over the wounds reopened by cranes dredging a lifeless seabed. The flag of Bagnoli will soar over this construction site in the ways and times dictated by the community—free from institutional constraints, free from power games, to manifest itself in all its beauty, determination, and independence.
A flag of rage for all the dead of this land, a flag of dignity for a community that demands a free sea, a flag of memory that does not forget the violence endured, a flag that tells of the possible utopia of a horizontal, supportive, and peaceful society.
Do you see it? A flag only needs the wind.
