Figli del Vesuvio – Live Performance

Ius Soli – Campania Felix Delenda Est

On February 22, 2020, The Prolegomena per un museo archeologico della Zona Rossa residency opened with Figli del Vesuvio, a live performance featuring five Vesuvian boxers: Gaetano Nespro, Nunzio Nespro, Andrea Nespro, Antonio D’Amico, Francesco Catapano.

Boxing as a Language of Place

The performance engaged with the contradictions of the Vesuvian landscape—a place suspended between natural disaster, myth, and survival. Through a choreographed sequence of sparring, stance, and motion, the fighters performed a visual and physical mapping of the land, embodying:

• The weight of history and inherited trauma.

• The ritual of movement, linking training to survival.

• The friction with the soil, as an act of measuring presence and disappearance.

Boxing was not just a sport but a performative tool—a body-to-body archive where each hit, stance, and feint resonated with the past, present, and uncertain future of the Red Zone.

The Space as an Arena

For one night, O’ Vascio Room Gallery became a gym, an archive, and a ritual space, where the tension between discipline, struggle, and endurance took shape through movement. The performance blurred the line between:

• Athletic training and choreography

• Combat and storytelling

• The body as an archive and the land as an opponent

Following the performance, Figli del Vesuvio remained a central reference throughout the residency, reinforcing the project’s core question:

How do we inscribe resistance into the landscape? How do we make memory a physical act?