Verona is considered among the most far-wing province in Italy, a laboratory for a culture which mixes nationalism, fascism, and ultras football culture. This is also the place I come from. Such a political nature of the city is rooted in its history and landscape, particularly in the hypocritical relationship upon which the territory was conceived and constructed, evaluating the city center as a museum while neglecting the neighborhoods around it - built massively during the economic boom - as part of the urban fabric. This defines a distorted and idyllic relationship to history, carefully detached from the inhabitable wasteland where most of Veronians live, fragmented places cut by infrastructures that grew unplanned, and where social housing fades into dismissed industrial land.

In this context, I still define my Heimat, and I imagined last spring to design a flag for those places: not for the represented ones in the mono-centrical perspective of a city. A flag is, to a certain extent, the archetype of the nationalist symbols, a landmark for borders, identities, and territories. A non-flag becomes instead a symbol for missing identities, for forgotten territories neglected during the process of identity making.

Telo, April 2022, Verona, Photography by Elena Botti