Lecture Performance by Michele Masucci: Rural Revolt, Maschito, 1943

Welcome to join us at Index for Rural Revolt, Maschito, 1943, a lecture performance by Michele Masucci that explores how histories of revolt can be reactivated as living, sensorial, and collective forms of knowledge.

Departing from the short-lived Republic of Maschito in Southern Italy in September 1943, the work examines a moment of revolt against fascist authority that opened a space for collective self-organization. Through assemblies and shared governance, villagers reorganised political and material life.

The piece unfolds through a composition of voice, song, narrative, and gesture. Arbëreshë folk songs activate a sonic archive of migration. Hand gestures are explored as key means of collective coordination during the revolt. Narrative segments recount events and invite the audience into a shared, collective re-imagination, situating the revolt within broader histories of rural struggle and forms of fascism.

Approaching Maschito as an unfinished proposition, the work revisits marginalised histories as shared inquiries into the conditions for land, labour, and political imagination today.

About the event
Lecture performance 18:30-19:30
Workshop and discussion 19:30-20:00

The lecture performance is free and open for anyone to participate.
For registration and/or questions, please contact:
michele.masucci@kkh.se

About the artist
Michele Masucci is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Stockholm. His work investigates the intersections between artistic practice and political organization.

His ongoing research project Territories of Imagination: The Republic of Maschito explores the 1943 rural revolt in Southern Italy as a spontaneous peasant revolt and anti-fascist moment of self-organization, examining how infrastructures of care, labour, and language can become the basis for political transformation. Through performative methods, archival inquiry, and collective experimentation, his work engages with histories of resistance as sites for rethinking contemporary political possibilities.

About the project
Territories of Imagination: The Republic of Maschito is a long-term artistic research project by Michele Masucci hosted by the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, developed in collaboration with a diverse range of practitioners, that explores how artistic practices shape political futures through collective organization and imagination. Taking the 1943 anti-fascist revolt in Maschito—where villagers briefly established a self-governed republic as a point of departure, the project expands into a broader inquiry through the collection of narratives from autonomous social centres and artistic collectives. By bringing together historical and contemporary experiences, it investigates the material, social, and affective conditions that enable self-organisation in both art and political life today, foregrounding practices of care, shared governance, and alternative infrastructures beyond the state.

Read more about the project here