Text by Manuel Beinat
All Images © Chiara Pirra
Chiara Pirra (b. 1987) is a photographer and curator whose visual practice explores the anthropology of emotions, the politics of care, domestic space, and the tensions between conflict and rights within marginalized communities. Her ongoing research investigates the relationship between human beings and landscape, focusing on contemporary forms of the right to the city within peripheral and marginalized communities.
Central to Pirra’s work is a sustained attention to childhood and pre-adolescence, understood as privileged spaces through which to examine emotional education as a cultural and political framework.
According to bell hooks, “marginality is a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” The margin offers a vantage point from which to observe, create, and imagine alternatives—new worlds altogether. Language itself, much like the margin, “is also a place of struggle”.
Yet margins do not emerge on their own. Someone always decides where the periphery begins— whether geographical or social—and what must be avoided, erased, or “redeveloped.” Whatever exists beyond the acceptable border is rejected; whatever fails to conform to the bourgeois gaze of decorum, order, and meritocracy is pushed aside. Those who define the boundaries of the margin rarely inhabit it themselves. And it is precisely this question of inhabiting —fragile but stubborn— that lies at the heart of Un Giardino Segreto (A Secret Garden) by Chiara Pirra.
Photographed over the course of nine months, primarily on Via Raimondi in Bologna, the project follows four families —nine children in total— living in a squatted housing occupation.
The city of Bologna becomes the outpost that temporarily sheltered this garden, attempting to protect it at least until the eviction eventually arrived. Knowing the exact location where these photographs were taken is useful, certainly—the housing crisis in a mid-sized city like Bologna feels dramatically more severe today than it did even a decade ago—but it is not essential.
The images do not need an address in order to exist. They belong to a specific historical moment: one shaped by a deepening housing crisis, skyrocketing rents, overtourism, gentrification, grotesque late capitalism, chronically low wages, and the legislative crackdown of the current Italian government, which increasingly criminalizes poverty and those searching for dignified housing. Absolute poverty continues to rise, slowly and relentlessly.
But these photographs resist geographical confinement. Un giardino Segreto is everywhere and nowhere at once —like a lost island suspended outside reality, inhabited by children forced to grow up too quickly.
What Pirra captures exists in a constant state of tension between dream, trauma, and hope.
Photography, itself another form of language —and therefore, returning to hooks, another space of struggle— becomes a political site where marginality can exist and speak.
The children, absolute protagonists and guardians of the garden, play inside the storm of the housing crisis. That alone becomes a revolutionary gesture: unconscious, instinctive, pure. Rest becomes resistance. Idleness becomes defiance.
Capitalism teaches us that housing is a commodity—a product to buy, sell, earn, and deserve. But inside this garden, nobody wants to play the neoliberal game. Instead, the project searches for new ways of inhabiting space, imagining family, and redefining the very meaning of home.
One more note on photography as language: the “assault on heaven” carried out by families in housing occupations is translated for the viewer through images. In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, hooks asks: “Do I dare speak to the oppressed and the oppressor in the same voice? Do I dare speak to you in a language capable of transcending domination—a language that does not bind you, fence you in, or hold you captive?”
The margins have learned to communicate differently from the status quo. Meanwhile, dominant culture —entrenched in its privileges and aesthetic codes— has often embraced an iconography of suffering that is stylized, moralistic, and ultimately reductive. The hardship of life inside a housing occupation is real. It is daily, material, unavoidable. But it is not the only force at work here, nor should it become totalizing. Especially now, when care itself —the most subversive act available in these dark times— becomes the fuel for imagining another way of living, another idea of home, another model of access and belonging.
It is through care, in fact, that authorship itself begins to dissolve. Before taking photographs, Pirra first inhabited the margin alongside the families, building relationships rooted in trust and duration.
The photographic act cannot be complete without the presence—social and political before merely visual—of those being portrayed.
Pirra’s camera adapts itself to the playful, irreverent gaze of the children. The hierarchy between photographer and subject begins to flatten. The camera stops functioning as an external device and instead becomes part of the occupation’s emotional fabric: a familiar, reassuring object capable of giving shape to dreams. Once again, the photographs become spaces of gentle resistance and collective struggle—sites of dialogue between political bodies. This is the language capable of moving beyond domination.
The project recently evolved into a dummy book created in collaboration with the children themselves. It resembles a secret diary, the kind guarded obsessively during childhood. A realist fable, written by Luca Bertocci, is tucked away at the end of the book, accompanying the pictures. Here too, magical realism collides with another form of realism altogether: the brutal material conditions faced by those forced to occupy a home in order to defend their dignity. Occupation is a choice, yes—but one shaped by external pressures and political decisions that abandon many in order to satisfy a few: tourism, private student housing, finance, and speculative real estate markets.
Imagining alternative worlds is a difficult and tangled process, much like the intertwined roots and branches that appear in the final section of Pirra’s dummy: trapped leaves, knotted bark, overgrown shrubs concealing unknown paths. Which is precisely why imagination, play, and idleness become necessary tools for those born and raised at the margins.
The trauma of not having a home is transformed into dream. Photography carries that transformation forward through a universal language.
Mark Fisher might have called it “desire without a name.”
The families living in occupation would simply call it home.
The book is self-produced in nine copies — such as the number of the children who took part in the occupation —, each one hand-assembled and bound. They’ll circulate through temporary loans — dropped into spaces where people can pick them up, flip through them, and sit with them. The idea is simple: get the work in front of people who might not otherwise encounter it, and let conversations happen organically, without the gatekeeping that usually comes with art books and limited editions.
So far, the dummy has been hosted as part of the selected projects for the Shortlist of the Fotofabbrica Prize 2026 at DiecixDieci photo festival in Gonzaga, and as winner of the Open Call for editorial projects at Zero Negativo Festival in Santeramo in Colle, near Bari.
The upcoming tour dates will be announced in the next few months and will take place in both photographic and non-photographic spaces, including neighborhoods with high rates of housing emergencies and outlying areas, with the aim of using the book as a tool for collective and social reflection even during its exhibition and presentation.
