Fuori Programma’ (Unscheduled) is the final outcome of Irene Ros' PhD project “Performing Stragismo and Counterspectacularisation: Italian right-wing Terrorism and Its Legacies”, which investigates the employment of spectacular elements in the Italian right-wing terrorist attacks (1969-1980) and their highly politicised yearly commemorations, and asks how they impacted Italian collective memory.

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The project stages the under-represented narratives of 20 Italian women who were young adults in the 1970s and belonged to the majority of the population, i.e. people who were not involved in Italian political violence. Their memories were collected through a participatory practice that interrogates the process of knowledge-making itself; the practice included video-recorded conversations over Zoom.

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Six students from the University of Edinburgh engaged in weekly theatre workshops in the Italian language; the performance premiered at The Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh, on 24th May 2023.

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The performance draws a line between the memories of the aftermath of World War II and the following decades, showing the roots of Italian divided memory. By employing oral history as a research methodology, the project asks: through which models are collective trauma and collective memory elaborated, how are they transmitted intergenerationally, and how can we ethically represent memory gaps?

Created by Irene Ros
Music by Lucas Jordan

Images by David Monteith Hodge