Riccardo is an architect, editor and researcher working at the intersection of migration studies and critical ecologies. His work focuses on the environment plays in propagating forms of violence.
Riccardo leads the MA City Design studio focused on ‘migrant’ circulations and spaces across the European Union. His practice explores the politics and effects of secondary migration, together with forms of resistance emerging in response to bordering practices, to question notions of belonging, identity, and citizenship.
Riccardo holds a MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also PhD student in the Department of Visual Cultures, as well as an MA in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of Genoa.
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Research interests
Riccardo’s research explores different media such as moving images and printed matters to investigate emancipatory politics, constructed natures and the role the environment plays in shaping cultural identities and subjectivities.
He is interested in practice-based approaches as they move across multiple scales – from the scale of the object to semi-natural landscapes – and temporalities. Some of those includes collaborative practices engaging with colonial botany, environmental science, radical politics, experimental narratives, and forms of visual advocacy.
Practice
Riccardo’s practice departs from the field of Critical Spatial Practices to compile experiments in counter-mapping, extended timelines, and other forms of spatial interventions.
His projects are developed across multiple fields and disciplines in collaborations with audio/video practitioners, NGOs, environmental scientists, legal experts, artists and researchers.
Riccardo’s practice explores politics and effects of the environment, intended both as media for the propagation of violence and as epistemic device bridging colonial practices of knowledge production/extraction with the futurity of climate adaptation strategies.
Current and recent projects
Something of the Sun (short documentary); 2022
Something of the Sun (in collaboration with Hanna Rullmann) is a research-based film project that explores the meanings of acclimatised landscapes in the context of their proximity to the French-Italian securitised border, as well as the increasingly changing climatic conditions. The documentary investigates relations between European identity and landscape, addressing the making of the tropics, notions of artificiality and belonging, as well as nativeness and invasiveness.
Research Architecture: Pedagogies, Politics and Practices (book series); 2022–
Research Architecture: Pedagogies, Politics and Practices is a book series by the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London) edited by Riccardo Badano, Tomas Percival and Dr Susan Schuppli). The publications foreground the innovative practice-based methodologies and modes of political engagement assembled within the CRA in response to some of the most pressing spatial and political urgencies.
Publications, exhibitions and other outcomes
Editor
(Forthcoming) Research Architecture: Pedagogies, Politics, and Practices, book series by the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London), published by Spector Books in Leipzig
(2020) Formafantasma – Cambio (ed. together with Rebecca Lewin for Buchhandlung Walther König/Serpentine Galleries)
(2019) Footnotes from the Centre for Research Architecture (IF Publications/Gato Negro)
Exhibitions
(2022) Something of the Sun, screening at Procida 2022,
Italian Capital of Culture
(2021) Upstream the Border, presented at MEDITERRANEA19-Young Artists Biennale
(2019–20) Hostile Environment presented at ar/ge kunst, Iowa State University, Z33-House of Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture