On the 3rd of April of this year, a few weeks ago, in the middle of a pandemic, inside a world that we all recognised as infected for the Covid-19: the virus whom we owe – in this tragedy, in truth – the merit of having taken the responsibility of having uncovered a systematic illness of a capitalist society that allows the speculative monopoly of the wealth, that allows the profit of the war industry, that allows the reckless exploitation of the Earth natural resources… here on the 3rd of April, in the middle of the pandemic, while the ONU appeal for a global armistice for all the wars was pretty much ignored, and in many places in the world – although we, in our little rooms, think to be closed up at home and safe – in the world, dozens of armed conflicts keep going, more or less forgotten: because Covid-19 does not stop the wars in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa or in South America… so the 3rd of April also the Italian press reported the death of Helin Bölek.
Helin was the singer of Grup Yorum, an anti-fascist Turkish musician collective, symbol from many years for the rights of the oppressed ones. Helin died at the age of 28 for a hunger strike that she kept doing for 228 days started in May 2019.
The musician collective Grup Yorum has a long history of political activism with their art, their voices, with their instruments, with the music, with thoughts and bodies… and bodies (!). They have built and manifested the bond between folk culture, which was their field of artistic expression, and socialist ideology that was, and still is, their field of ideal, human, social, civic, collective, communitarian, expression.
Their fight for human rights in Turkey, and in the whole world… coming back… coming back to a history that I did not know… I read and realise that the fight for rights done by this musician collective in Turkey, and in the whole world- until the full support towards the Kurdish minority – have brought to their arrest in 2016, during the repression that followed the golpe, that failed, against Erdoğan.
And from then on, there is imprisonment, that brought the members of the group to be persecuted as terrorists from Erdoğan government, with the charge of contempt against the institutions and the belonging of a terrorist organisation of far-left.
The group is composed of 5 members. In May 2019, they began a hunger strike. Here they decide that the last one, and first one, a field for fighting was their own bodies; they put their own bodies in the public negotiation, a political one, for claiming of human rights, and they start a hunger strike until a self-induced death for hunger; in the name of the freedom of expression. And we see the images – we see the images – we see the images of Helin when she was still alive, but already a living skeleton. We look at images of a body that is about to die. She is the first one to die. On the 24th of April, Mustafa Koçak, 28 years old guitarist of the group, also dies in the jail of Şakran. On the 7th of May Ibrahim Gökçek, bass-player dies after 323 days of protest to claim the right to freedom of expression. Ibrahim from the jail is moved to the hospital because the Erdoğan government accepts only one of their request: the one that allows the group to perform again in public. Accepting this claim in a paradox, in that the group members are already dying. So Ibrahim is moved from the jail to the hospital, and he quits the strike. But the body is so weak that it does not keep up; the body dies. From the hospital, Ibrahim writes a public letter that arrives at us through the media, and through the press, also in Italy.
A piece of that letter says what I am about to read, it says: – the fight that is consuming inside my body will end with the death or the victory of life. What I know is that until they do not accept our claim, I will be holding to life also in this path towards the death -.
So…here..in this collective thinking and speaking, together, about what scenarios might open with this social, economic, health, humanitarian crisis of a global virus. This thinking out loud, this thinking out together, where we are asked to speak out possible words about possible ways of “inhabiting-future”, I wonder.. which future is opening up starting from here, from a present that leaves us with only one tool for fighting: the body in the act of dying. And even more, through dying, the dead body.. the dead body… If we think that – as we read – during the funeral, the police sequestrated the dead body of Ibrahim. They sequestrated the dead body! So we think about how much subversive power there is in that self-determination of living, and dying: without a home, without a single future… that is in the awareness of the ultimate choice… of not having a body anymore, not having a home, not having a future, but a divine gesture that avenges all who remains the right to be thinking, the right of a future. And, again, we see images of Hein, of Mustafa, of Ibrahim. And I must say… they are hooked onto moving images, on a film, this thing that really moved me; that is to know that in the neighbourhood of Kucuk Armutlu, on the upland of Istanbul, exist the so-called “houses of death”. These houses host the activists and in particular the women that want to do a hunger strike until death. It is here, that towards the end of March, some police squads have done an incursion and brought away Helin, the guitarist Mostafa, put them in a hospital where patients are fed against their will. This is a measure that is also used in Turkish jails. And actually, the hospital in which Helin and Mustafa were brought in against their will, is a jail.
Going back to the images. I have seen a video filmed inside these “houses of death”, what might have been, perhaps, the last weeks of Helin. She is inside one of these houses where other women are taking care of her. In these images, we can see Helin feet inside a water bowl with a woman massaging her feet and her shoulder. You can see her drinking, but actually, she does not properly drink but only wets her lips with a sugary tea; then a group of men and women singing outside of this house in a square and Helin is looking out of the window, and they are singing for her. She is at the window showing a victory gesture with two fingers, the same gesture that we will see and we saw Ibrahim doing.
Here it is… victory. This thing is very powerful… this image that we are given as responsibility… of us looking and seeing this victory gesture made by dying bodies. So, whose victory? For who it is? Who must collect that sign of victory? Here… in this days – and many times this was defined a hovering time, and actually it was, but only at the beginning, after the start of the quarantine, inside the heart of the collective fear of dying for COVID – there have been some moments of flaming progress, a collective feeling of humanity, incandescent. Then, unfortunately, with the progressive return to normality, that honest fever of ideals came back to be considered a failure, because again the fight for particular rights was open, the rights of categories, of jobs, of professions. But we have not seen any fight for life as a collective body with the same dignity; that is the unconditional fight for life.

The first thing I do when I have to deal with a topic that might be familiar, or not, is to engage with its etymology. I have always been convinced that no word is neuter and that inside the depth of words is possible to find their true meaning. There, we can find stories of men and women, whole countries and cultures, layered on top of each other, that enable words to be spongy and porous, capable of holding and spreading meanings that can move away from those that, at first sight, might seem the obvious ones.
I remember that “abitare” (t/n: “to inhabit”) has to do with “habere” and “haberi”, with the Latin verb “habere” that means “avere” in Italian (t/n: “to have”) like if it was… an activity that takes place continuously. “Abitare” (t/n: “to inhabit”), therefore, means to be owning a place or a dimension or a position with a certain continuity. This idea of proximity, almost embedded in the relationship that exists between those who inhabit and the space that is inhabited, is certainly also connected to the concept of ownership. Therefore it includes an idea of continuity.
Surely, among the problems and the questions that are emerging in this historical moment, which all the inhabitants of this planet are sharing, is that we have lost the culture of inhabiting as a matter of permanence. I am not talking about those group of people who are obliged, for different and dramatic reasons for war and surviving, to leave their physical places to look for new ones. I am talking about a bad habit, that is characteristic of the north-Atlantic way of living, embedded in the western and northern Europe. This compulsivity of easy-access to anything, for which also places are not inhabited anymore… but places are visited or used for a short time. In our present condition, which seems to have nothing to do with our primordial nomadic life, the profound and etymological sense of inhabiting has been lost.
And in any case, yes, “abitare” (t/n: “to inhabit”) does not have … it is not necessarily linked to a physical dimension; it should not… in my opinion… only describe the place where – to quote Chatwin – “we hang our hat”, or the place where we go home every night to sleep, or space where we keep our books, our clothes, the photographs from our childhood. Actually, it is even possible to inhabit with continuity, and with the awareness of this continuity, intangible dimensions such as that of Language. Language represents home for many of us.
It always comes into my mind, what Hannah Arendt said when she was interviewed in the mid-1950s… I think… about her escape to the USA when she fled the Nazi persecution and of her condition of being at that time in a social and cultural situation that was completely different from before.
At one point, she was asked what remained with her of Germany and her identity: a german woman, a german philosopher. She answered that what remained was the Language. Although she was also able to write brilliantly and fluently in English, and knew many other languages – and English remained her main Language for the rest of her life – for her, German was truly her Language, a strong point of reference that could give her comfort, a perception of habitat, of an intimate, deep, very personal and subjective inhabiting; regardless of all that the German world had represented in the last years of its life in Germany.
And I like to remember that, when we speak about languages, we always speak of mother tongue, something that is warm and welcoming and opens itself to include us and others, which can or cannot inhabit that same Language.
In these days of global re-definition, sometimes rhetoric, often convulsive, unnecessarily accelerated, dramatic where it does not require to be, unconcerned of the authentic dramas that concern the destruction of people, the destruction of places… these days there is an ongoing reworking in which a good part of thinkers, and cultural producers, or self-styled ones, has the desire to take part: excluding once again, the idea, the possibility, that the houses are always built together and so bringing on the same rhetoric of deconstruction that we inherited from the great thinkers of the 70s of the French school; without reflecting that is much more important not to preserve.
So, this deconstruction leaves us a little hopeless. And even the word “abitare” (t/n: “to inhabit”), if we deconstruct it, leaves us not only without walls around but also without a path to follow. So, without being conservative, which interests me always less – and really never interested me – I think we should dwell on the possibility of cultivating… here… cultivate, but also cultivate our inhabiting, which means to be giving continuity to something by transforming it; so there is preservation which is not precisely preservation. But the possibility that things have a different life is also accepted, that they must have a different life and must open up to include others.
If I think about the artists I dealt with; I realize that their declination of “inhabiting” is almost always connected to their Language. For me too, “inhabiting” a language means to be living in an articulated thought; even if a significant part of the books I studied and the texts that influenced me, I read them in English or French, or they were translations from other languages such as German, Russian, Dutch and Finnish. But my thought is articulated, modulating itself every time, always inevitably in Italian… I am a monoglot. Who knows if this means that I have only one home or maybe that my house is large and with rooms and has a strange map that is impossible to draw.
Places are also the words that we use to describe them. So, the idea that Language is the space we live in has consistency; even when we try to describe physical places, the places where we are, those where we have been, those we would like to return to and the ones we felt to be “inhabiting”. The beauty of Language is that Language is always the best way to describe a community – around the theme of community and the specificity of places, words and speculations of all kinds have been, and still are, continuously spent. Whether a community is locally defined or a scattered, branched, capillary, polycentric community, in the end, the only thing a community truly shares is a language, even if is deformed, distorted, temporary. The members of a community inhabit their own relations through the Language; which can be a relationship, a voluntary sharing, incidental or even endured, at times given from different circumstances. You are inside places in the same way you are inside words.
This thing that is going on at the moment has also put back into place everything that representing a socio-cultural construct of a violation of our sphere, both of the subjective one, which is often – wrongly in my opinion – referred to as the private one; but above all of the relational one. The scholar Paul B. Preciado wrote an article, controversial and interesting, in which he says that “the new frontier is the epidermis “… and speaking of relationships, not only in the semantic sphere but also about the construction of mechanisms of domination and control, the author makes a synthesis between the meanings of immunity and community. Almost at the end, he says: “your skin is the new Lampedusa”. So the whole construction of the concept of “fortress Europe”- the fortress of this world clumsily called “western”, where the legitimacy of the terms has to be redefined every time – has moved the boundaries of its own xenophobia leaving a maritime and territorial dimension to coagulated on our skin. Here, the authentic border is only that of access to well-being, of the misinterpreted right of citizenship, according to which some people have rights and others do not. This has been reduced to the culture of suspicion, privacy and deprivation. The battle for self-assertion is no longer a matter of national policy and therefore no longer has to do with national sovereignty. Still, it is unbridled sovereignty, no longer of individual subjectivity, but precisely of the physical body which becomes no longer permeable.
And we continue to inhabit our bodies, and to use our bodies, to physically inhabit other dimensions at different scales… But all of this has been profoundly transforming itself into a corruption – I believe – of the beauty of “inhabiting”. In this long holding of thought, and therefore of the Language inside a place, whether material or immaterial, “inhabiting” begins to take on the meaning, always more, of “defence”; as it has always been in totalitarian regimes, in the absolutism of all kinds and vocations, in State terrorism.
On the other hand, going back to the dimension of inhabiting could be healing, a relational and dynamic inhabiting, so a kind of inhabiting in which there is the dialectical capability, the dialectical property, of the Language; it could be therapeutic, it should be a guide in this time, to clarify and take back those behaviours, those attitudes, which in contrast to any narrative of selfishness and homo homini lupus, are instead deeply human and have allowed societies to evolve and develop. These are precisely those skills that enable you to live with others and to do it peacefully. And also to take care of them. This is the purpose that we should give ourselves, and the task that we could commit ourselves to, and that I will try to give myself: to keep high the attention really high around the possibility of taking care of someone else; thus expanding and opening my inhabiting in this perspective.
Whenever I think about the demagogy as linked to the protection of borders, it always comes to my mind that, after all, there is a decline, a sunset, embedded in our European identity. I do not like the word “identity” because it has to do with the fixity of death, something identical to itself, and so to the European narrative.
“Europe” is the name of a woman kidnapped by a God who came from the coast of Mediterranean Asia, seized by a God, a male, a sovereign, a rapist. This is Europe, the Greek Erebo – this is what it is in Greek – the region of the dead. When Europe was taken away from the beaches of Tyre, on the back of a God transformed into a bull, sails towards the west, toward the Erebo, there where according to the Greeks there was precisely the kingdom of the dead.
We should remember this more often – abitare (t/n: to “inhabit”).
Who knows why in the current Language, “inhabiting” seems to have to do with the idea of being owners of something, in the territorial definition of own someone space. When instead, it should be quite the opposite.

The condition that we are experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, whether this is phase 1, phase 2 or which other stages will await us… here, there is no doubt that the conditions of inhabiting are turned upside down. Indeed, we have been forced into inhabiting our house. If by inhabiting we mean living at home, inhabiting our own home, there where we define our individuality, our personality, and represents us, in some ways: the house, the home, the limited space of interiority, of the family, of affections – in short, everything that in some ways has characterised the idea of inhabiting, for centuries. It is clear how this space that of the house, the same space of inhabiting has been completely turned upside down since a couple of months. I am talking about myself… the house has become not only the refuge and the place of retreat, an intimate dimension, or the place where one takes care of oneself, and one has loved ones but has also become the workplace.
I am one of the “smart workers”, like many in this period, and this condition made me think. The work, traditionally linked to a public dimension, takes place outside the home. Each one of us receives a role from the work he does, from the professional relationships he maintains, a public position. In short, the place is linked to a public space, to relationships, even casual ones, which are characterised precisely by the job he/she does; they are produced precisely by the work itself. The moment I found myself, a university professor, to give lectures or to hold meetings at home, or to move those relationships that instead characterise my public space and my public function; into the domestic and private space… here is that I started having strange sensations: precisely the fact of having to show, for example, where I live and where I live to strangers, or almost strangers, or to colleagues with whom I used to share only public space, like that of the university.
Then, like many others, I asked myself what to show of myself, of my personality and the way of organising my own space, the one of the house. In short, I had to be selective about what showing of myself, a thing that usually happens in the public space; this might happen on the street when you meet a friend or an acquaintance. Then you expose yourself showing what you think is more suitable, for that occasion. By choosing with care, where to place the computer, or the video camera, and the background for my public meetings, even when carried out at home, I realised that, like many other professionals, perhaps the video background I am most at my ease, and in which I am also less exposed, was that of my library. Like many others, I decided to show books behind me. This is an access to a world, the private one, which, however, in some ways, shows characteristic of our public dimension; in short, what we usually show of ourselves in the public sphere. The other element that made me think is the option offered by live streaming platforms of blurring the background (t/n: during video-conference). In this – the opportunity of blurring the background – I have found a kind of reticence, the will to escape the indiscreet gaze; which, however, does nothing else than recreating those dynamics that are in place in public spaces, that is hiding, disguising and not overexposing yourself. This caution, in defence of our privacy could also be seen as repulsive, even offensive for whoever is showing you the background, exposing himself and showing you where he lives and something of himself, something of his more intimate self: his own home.
Today we found ourselves to transform the house into a strange crossroad between public and private spheres. In short, is the place and the space in which our private and public dimension overlay until they are almost fused. Perhaps, what this entails is that the grand tradition of bourgeois society and ideology is demolished because the distinction between public and private; private vices and civic virtues, as to speak, disappear. Why? Because, I am required, for most of my day, to manage my public space, public relations and public virtues in a private space where before I was provided with that darkness, that shadow, that penumbra in which I could transgress, compared to a specific expected order, compared to the looks of the other ones; those glances that we continuously meet on the street or in public places, on public transport and so on. It is like to say… that boundary, threshold, door, that divides inside and outside, that separates private and public, that separates home and city, in a certain sense, is gone, that threshold has disappeared.
I also asked myself the question: what’s out there now?… There is a trend that was already in place before the pandemic; that is to bring inside the own house the work, the public sphere, the relationships between strangers, relationships that go beyond the strongest bonds, that is, the familiar bond. Perhaps, we are talking about a trend and a project that in some ways this pandemic has accelerated more than produced. – However, the question remains: In a moment in which space, governed, controlled, ordered in a certain way by society, is no longer an exclusive space for public exhibition, but also becomes another space; a space that perhaps is foreign to all of us, what’s out there now? After all, in these two months, we have become accustomed, in some way, to manage exclusively in the domestic space both our public and private sphere. For now, I feel I can give an answer, also referring to classic narratives about the origin of civilisation and of our civil life forms: at the beginning, there was a forest. There was an unknown, dark, entangled space, a dangerous space that, in some ways, inspires fear, inspire terror. And I also imagine this wild situation, that we are just beginning to experience, now that we can go out on the street more easily. Whom do we meet? We meet people with masks who maybe inspire distrust to us: the risk of contagion, social distancing and safety distances measures, these masks that hide and conceal from our eye those facial signals that perhaps indicated hospitality, or maybe extraneousness, or maybe even distrust.
Here, we do not have and cannot have, in this phase, when we go out into the forest… we cannot count on those signals, now conventional, that lead us to approach or reject one another. We are all more or less at the same distance, and all more or less unknown to each other; all of us more or less unconscious, not aware of what the other can bring about to us. In short, those criteria of orientation are missing, and also those ones for decoding attitudes and expressions we were used to. Yes, we will be able to find new conventions and new ways of expressing interest and curiosity towards each other. But for now, I believe that perhaps fear and mistrust are prevailing.
As it was already happened in the origins, in the forest that preceded the space ordered and organised by the humans; that is the space that we then called the city, and which is the first form of social organisation, that was the projection, in some ways, of the first refuge that man has produced compared to this forest that is the house, the home.
What happened then that could also occur today? The first space in which humans found themselves was clearings, out of the forest dominated precisely by the dangers of nature, the risks of wild fairs; in other words, the threat of dying. So the clearing was the first space that we found ourselves in.
In other words, all human beings and all of those who were escaping the dangers of the forest found themselves in a clearing or in an open space where light could penetrate the density of the forest; outside the thickness of the wood, in this clearing, we recognise ourselves as alike, we identify ourselves as belonging to a possible, potential community. So the first Habitat of humans, of the forms of life – I believe – rather than the house, or the home, or the four walls, is precisely the clearing; in short, a natural space: not a space that is already artificially designed and built by man, but space where you can start from scratch. This space must be thought of.
First of all, we recognise ourselves as all equal guests of this clearing and this forest. For this kind of tradition and idea, in origin, there was a forest. All human beings are lost in the forest, gathered in tiny clans but also as solitary hunters. The moment we gather in the clearing, the first forms of the organisation can begin. However, it starts with the organisation of shared space and the space for cohabitation.
Everything begins with hospitality. Before being guests of the home, of the house of someone else, or of a city built and organised by a community, we are the guests of the forest. We are guests of this clearing; we are guests of a space not yet built or constructed and neither organised. This is our first Habitat. In short, perhaps this forest is what awaits us outside from now on. In short, to be disoriented and frightened by a new world and a different reality to which we are not accustomed, this is perhaps what could happen… and to start looking at each other, to discuss and to recognise each other as similar, but similarly guests of an unknown world, of a world that we still have to learn to decipher and understand. Concerning this origin of the human being, as a particular form of animal life, two traditions in modernity show us two alternative ways.
The first is the one dominated by fear, which refers to the state of nature theorised by Thomas Hobbes in his original text of foundation of modern politics where he exposes the conception of the absolute State or Leviathan. In the “state of nature”, we live scattered like lone wolves, who are afraid of the others and each other aggressiveness. For Hobbes, this fear brings us to ask for security delegating that natural freedom that we all initially have in the state of nature to a sovereign; someone who tells us how to behave, who tells us how to be in the world. This model arises precisely from the fear of the forest. When the forest is characterised primarily by fear, perhaps it is the model that will most easily take place, particularly in the situation in which we are. We need to be told how to behave because we are no longer able to behave; we do not want to be all guests equally, but we want a ruler who will tell us how to live in this clearing again.
Giambattista Vico provides the alternative to this model. He also imagines that humans originally lived in a sizeable immense forest that he calls in Latin “ingens sylva”. Here, humans lived dispersed and at an animal, primitive stage. According to Vico, what happens at that point? Here these animals not different from others; these human beings who lived in a state of animality not different from the other; they finally recognised themselves as the guests of the forest. This is what happened… for Vico the feeling of identifying themselves as guests of the forest, in this new environment, creates a new awareness that does not arise from the fear of being killed by each other, like it was for Hobbes; instead, it risen from the amazement and wonder towards this new world and from the potentialities that this world might offer to us. For Vico, we leave the forest, or rather we begin to inhabit the forest, and the clearings of this forest, through “Poetic Wisdom”. The beginning of the myth, and the narration of a new language holds together these animals that gather in the forest. It makes them communicate with each other also makes sure that these beings (that from now on we can call human) give names to things and organise a language to name the environment around them, to name this new Habitat. So they finally speak as guests, primarily as guests of a new habitat, of an original condition because everything is unknown, everything is foreign, everything is different. Starting to speak without delegating the word to a sovereign is to start talking to each other with words, with gestures, with signs, creating new customs and rules to be agreed on.
It is the beginning of human life. Vico calls this new beginning: “Poetic Wisdom”. It is precisely a new language, imaginative, creative; and his work is called precisely Scienza Nuova (t/n: “New Science”). If I had to wish something, for a new inhabiting, for inhabiting the future, for new conditions to create a new Habitat from now on – to begin to inhabit this forest that awaits us outside and that will no be any longer the public space, we are in used to, because maybe now we have brought it once and for all into the house -… here to imagine this wild condition, and so to begin to talk about it, to start to live it, to inhabit it, I wish that this “Poetic Wisdom” and the amazement for this new world, will be inspiring for us; rather than the fear of holding to those living conditions we are used to. Fearless of losing these conditions of life, without the fear of losing the orientation we were used to… exactly, I do not think this is the way to think about “Abitare-Futuro” (t/n: inhabiting future) because these are precisely the conditions of the house now, of the home in which we live our private and our public together; in which we fuse and confuse work and affections. So these fears may no stay any longer with us. Precisely, because outside is not a return to a public life that is waiting for us; but the exploration, knowledge and invention of Habitat in a forest that for now appears to us as unknown and mysterious.