A book to learn how to retake the city, starting with our eyes

“I wrote these reflections, hinted at or more elaborate, seeking delicacy, attention, towards every person, towards every place”, writes Emilia Giorgi. With her book, Giorni come stanze. Re-appropriating the city (Libria, 2020), investigates how our relationship with private and public space has changed since the first lockdown this spring. In this new publication, the author reads the places we inhabit as extensions of our bodies.  In addition to her reflections – pages of a diary in which she puts together scattered thoughts, anxieties and torments – Giorgi relies on the gaze of eight photographers, who tell her scenarios through “eight photographic sequences, composed of shots that are mostly free of constraints, often spontaneous, sometimes taken with the mobile phone camera, sometimes taken from old projects that ever came out of the open”.

Speaking of the journalist Luciana Castellina, quoted in one of the texts, the Roman curator and journalist “invites us to put ourselves on the line, to face and fight for the unpredictable. She invites us to take on the singular and collective responsibility of dealing with the necessary step and transformation towards a system that can only be different”.

We are rapidly returning to a condition comparable to that of March and April 2020. This time, however, we have at our disposal a powerful tool, a little booklet, which helps us to observe and discover the worlds that "our corner" reveals to us. The book Giorni come stanze tells us that assiduously looking at the spaces of our cities is the first, fundamental step in imagining, designing and transforming them.