“Linear time is a Western invention. Time is not linear; it is a wonderful entanglement where, at any moment, you can select points and invent solutions without beginning or end”
(Lina Bo Bardi)
The idea of continuous linearity prevails in the contemporary West, both in terms of time and productivity. In large parts of our society, the logics of neoliberalism and market-based economic growth have been internalized to an extent that allows making its imposed logic appear indispensable. Amid the sequence of produce-consume-dispose, opportunities to escape are not only rare but could be considered exclusive, especially when it comes to how we live together in an urbanized society. Places with socially engaged or mutual aid-based models of coexistence are hard to find and difficult to access in cities worldwide where spatial disparity grows and housing is treated as a commodity rather than a fundamental human right.
Streamed systems naturally raise the threshold for swimming against the current. Similar considerations can be applied to the phenomenon of desertion, at least in its most common interpretation, which refers to abandoning or giving up on the flow-like processes of a group and its actions. The judgmental assessment of a “deserter” as a coward, traitor, or egoist, revolves around the active decision against the group and its overarching purpose. Actions against the current must be punished, which means the eradication of free will or independent decision-making. In a certain sense, the neoliberal system represents a reverse logic while achieving similar results. Under the premise of individual freedom of choice and autonomous decision-making, the individual is pushed into the role of an active observer and participant, as long as the production cycle supports this narrative. In today’s world, however, the narrative of growth and prosperity for the entire international community has long given way to growing inequalities, armed conflicts, tax wars, and disasters linked to human-induced climate events. Here, considerations of how to break free from imposed systems and develop new ways of thinking become more than relevant. In this sense, desertion as a phenomenon becomes a fascinating attempt, if not a call, to liberate ourselves and tap into new ways of thinking. It is precisely this seemingly active, individual decision that deserves a more nuanced examination, especially when we detach the concept of “desertion” from its systemic connotations. The idea that any individual is capable of actively choosing to defy imposed systemic logic, even if only in theory, immediately liberates them from a passive role. Yet, as said, both the places and the opportunities to step out of the mainstream are rare and require energy and perseverance. As a result, most communities, especially those that are destitute due to fragility or vulnerability, remain excluded and in a constant state of lack of choices, which manifests as dependencies on social systems that compete for their needs. On a spatial level, urban areas are evaluated more and more into precious areas, in contrast to less attractive locations. Here, the neoliberal system has contributed to the critical state of cities, characterized by unaffordable housing costs as well as social and infrastructural imbalances (Aue et al., 2015).
This article offers a reflection on desertion from the perspective of space and people, highlighting two projects carried out by the two authors in their role as curators with their nonprofit collective, So.No Società Nomade (Nomadic Society). At the heart of both projects are intensive workshops on communal living and building, in which young creatives are invited to participate in designing alternative scenarios and developing innovative structures that can support these scenarios. One project, Software-ing Spaces (2023), focuses on an abandoned and contentious site, while the other, Seeds Under the Snow (2025), operates as part of an educational project with disadvantaged youth. Both are located in Bergamo, a medium-sized city in northern Italy, nestled between the nature reserves of the pre-Alpine landscape and the hyper-industrialized Po Valley, which is affected by changes in the labor market due to digitalization, over-tourism, and the consequences of the pandemic. The article describes how the two projects address urban challenges by creating safe spaces for action as speculative models for new social pacts. In doing so, it shifts back and forth between the two projects and examines them from the perspective of desertion in order to critically discuss their key findings.
Desertion found in neglected urban spaces or communities
If we understand desertion as a way to opt out of the system, we will also come to encounter those who already live outside of it. The places for potential encounter are locations or relationships with communities that have been pushed to the margins of society, and sometimes also with those who have already left the system. In the context of Bergamo, the projects we are involved in through our collective So.No aim to rediscover places outside the norm in their state of freedom and experimentation. Often-times, those places are located much closer than one might expect. Stepping out, therefore, does not necessarily mean leaving our familiar ambit, but rather changing the way we explore it – expanding our horizons to include the urban spaces in between. «Stay in the city, my friends, especially in the big city, where things happen, where you can go from one beaubourg to another […]», Albert Meister reminds us in La sois-disant utopie du Centre Beaubourg, a book that offers us glimpses into how a form of alternative society within the urban context could look like (1976, p. 179). According to Meister, we ought to “contaminate” the urban society instead of “isolating” ourselves, finding an endless circulation «without forced promiscuities that allows for nice re-encounters, friendship, love, change, renewal, anti-specialization, flight of imagination, and the existence of anything possible»; those other forms of lived realities are, therefore, possible and can be found in the urban areas that represents the «city lived outside the system» (Meister, 1976, p. 179).
One of the deserted places in Bergamo worthy of a rediscovery is the former Sant’Agata monastery from the 14th century, situated right in the richly layered city centre, a bit hidden and offside of the tourist beaten paths. Sant’Agata had been turned into a prison during Napoleon’s reign in Italy. Particularly the fascist period stands out in its more recent history, when partisans opposing the regime had been imprisoned there. ExSA could be considered a critical heritage site and, after the prison had relocated in the 1980s, the massive brick complex had lain abandoned for decades before falling under the administration of the municipality as a protected common good. Within a particular form of administration, offering the cooperation between civil society groups and the municipality, the project ExSA (Ex-Sant’Agata) emerged by the social association Maite in 2015 and, at a later project phase, was joined by our collective So.No. During an eight-year-long period, numerous social, artistic, and cultural events were developed inside of the former prison spaces, becoming a testing ground for self-management and collective decision-making. As the city decided to turn the experimental use of the urban common into a more normative approach in 2023, developing plans for its transformation into a housing complex, together with So.No, we initiated to curate a final project inside of ExSA, to showcase the success of ExSA on the one, and to demonstrate its potential in an intensified form on the other side, inviting different groups and actors to join the project for a week, transmitting its spirit and developing scenarios for alternate forms of living.
While ExSA marks the engagement with a place that has been deserted of societal attention for a long time, before being reactivated as an urban common, the social cooperative L’Impronta works for the inclusion of fragile individuals and their abilities through projects tailored to support people who are facing various challenges and limitations in their life. One of their projects is a social garden in the old town of Bergamo, situated on communal land between the Venetian fortified city walls and a gate ramp to one of the urban monumental gates. Being subject to landscape and heritage regulations, the cooperative turned the land into a vegetable garden and educational site, managing and maintaining the space integrating young people who have fallen outside of normative approaches. Believing in the approach of learning by doing, the team of social workers, educators, and gardening experts create a space for continuous empowerment, allowing individuals to find their own place and become part of a group as much as a sustainable urban agricultural project. The produced vegetables are picked up by the local community on a donation base that helps to co-fund the project. L’impronta acts against seclusion not only through the nature of the project, but also through reclaiming a space prominent and central in the urban pattern of the old town. Being a non profit organisation, the resources for the project are limited, reason for which we teamed up for an intense design workshop aiming to collectively design and build objects to support the gardening, harvesting, and educational activities of the cooperative.
Reflecting on the places and communities of our projects through the lens of desertion, makes the criticality of choice versus non-choice palpable. Both places and people can easily fall out of the system, being deserted through abandonment or neglect, or through the act of marginalisation when falling outside of societal norms or economic logics. The places and communities get deserted. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, in their deserted state there seems to be a potential for creating utopian visions, a space for experimentation, even though neglected places and communities are in need of initiatives or actors who, on the other hand, have actively decided to desert the mainstream places of activities and profit. Engaging with these realities allows us to move beyond intellectual or philosophical endeavours and embrace concrete practices, manifesting through mutual learning and design actions, oriented towards the betterment of the current situation towards collective vision of cohabitation worth-wanting, in a convivial and supportive manner. In doing so, these neglected places offer a testing ground to dissent forms of usage and gathering, where daily caring, maintaining and logistic rituals and practices constituted the very fundamentals of the social and cultural rituals. The deserted place, therefore, invites us to pose the fundamental questions of co-living, the basic decision making of how to make shared spaces work for the many. Meister relates those fundamental questions to a collective’s definition of «own rules of internal functioning» such as «Who will tidy up?» or «Will there be a communal wallet or will we collect every time we need to buy something?» (Meister, 1976, p. 43).
Finding together as groups who have no choice (deserted from society) and those who actively decide to desert the binary structures for the sake of new ways of social thinking (social deserters) allows us to newly pose ourselves existential questions and mark a freedom to create and think together.
Desertion as means of intervening, deconstruction, unlearning
In a second phase of the project work, after the detection of possibilities to engage with places or communities outside of the normative structure, the careful development of a programme is central to our work. The act of going off centre might be radically simple in gesture, yet requires a careful layout. Also, a lot of attention is put in the mediation between those who have an active choice for deserting the norms and the ones who find themselves deserted, or rather failed, by the systemic order. When planning an intervention and critical spatial practice, therefore, a large share of attention and energy falls onto the preparational activities.
In the case of Software-ing Spaces inside of ExSA, the second phase of the project translated into making the space ready for a spatial intervention by a big group of participating activists. While the spaces had largely remained in their original state of the abandoned prison, years of project work had left their traces in the form of left overs, both burden and potential for the planning of a spatial intervention that had the idea of building a soft, autonomous cohabitation at its core. All our curational choices in the preparation of the workshop related to testing autonomy as a form of social organisation, inspired from principles of self-determination, self-organisation, and the speculation around what can happen when normative concepts are dissolved. Already in the process of ordering all materials available on site, a phenomenon emerged that Collin Ward describes as “Theory of Spontaneous Order” in his 1973 published Anarchy of Action: «An important component of the anarchist approach to organisation is what we might call the theory of spontaneous order: the theory that, given a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error, by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of externally imposed authority could provide» (Ward, 2018 (1973), p. 34). An essential part of the intense building experience was to work with the conditions (and limitations) of the neglected place as much as to use only available materials (reuse). The process of defining common needs, as proclaimed by Ward, then, was both a social and material process in the case of Software-ing Spaces, and guaranteed also that the efforts of eight years of community work inside of ExSA was re-materialized and put into new form. Upon their arrival to ExSA for the Software-ing Spaces, a group of fifty participants settled inside of the former prison wards, finding and preparing themselves places to sleep across the cells, cellars, and corridors. The next essential need was to structure shared meals and to begin the organisation of transforming the prison spaces into an inhabitable and softly welcoming environment. Similarly to the selection process of the materials, the phenomenon of spontaneous order with its central components of improvisation and experiment as much as trial and error came to the fore. Together with mentors who had been active in projects alike (Guerilla Architects, Masha Fehse & Licia Soldavini, camposaz, and Collettivo Franco) subgroups were formed around different necessities of cohabitation and organised around the re-imagination of salotto (living), cucina (kitchen), corridoio (corridor), and parole (words). While the first three were linked to concrete spatial interventions, the latter focussed on the communication and mediation of contents. To accompany the interventions of the international group of participants, encounters with our local network who had been active in ExSA’s projects of the past eight years as well as the creative, social, and cultural neighbours of the former prison were organised. The connection of various backgrounds, of local and international expertise, of memory and new imaginary within a site-specific intervention marked a process of unlearning, deconstructing conventional narratives and exchanging them for radically new concepts made of existent, reused materials. Inside of Software-ing Spaces, normative roles of teacher and student or architect and builder were dissolved and exchanged for collaborators and care-takers, collective producers and experimental designers.
For Seeds Under the Snow, the second phase of the project related to the activation of our networks more than actually preparing the spaces, and drawing knowledge and material resources into the social garden. While ExSA had been a project that allowed us to create a capsule for experimentation inside of an abandoned place, here, we were prompted to connect with others swimming against the stream in Bergamo – and found many cooperation partners, ranging from independent fruit gardens to self-managed agricultural sites and peripheral social cooperatives. We also received a lot of support in material donations. The title Seeds Under the Snow withholds two components. It leans on David Goodway’s Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow (2012), collecting left-liberitarian writings of Great Britain [1]. It extends the idea of different (intellectual) crops waiting to blossom with the element of place and time, or rather, being placed and in need of time between being planted and coming to full potential. Seeds Under the Snow is a marker for a project of the many, of many hands, minds, ideas, materials coming together and working together inside of the social gardens in support of an educational and integration project for vulnerable youth.
Gathering once more students, craftsmen, and young professionals of interdisciplinary backgrounds for an intense workshop experience of a week, a first step was to make everyone aware of the interconnectedness of the social as well as the ecological network of Bergamo. Upon the start of the workshop, an explorative joint walk was undertaken. In moving together across the territory, stopping at various points visiting our network partners and significant territorial markers, we formed a collective understanding of territory as a group. Guided by experts from mycology, agronomy, traditional horticultural sciences, we were experiencing the interconnectedness of history, social norms, environment, contemporary challenges, resources, and the state of private and public property within it. Throughout the walk, we used different tools and methods to get closer to the ground and living beings, such as amplifying microphone headset, sound registration, frottage, sketches, foraging, and site-writing.
The social gardens, for the duration of a week, then, became a sort of open air school for processes of collective design in participatory processes. Once more, we had asked the support of mentors (Studio Curaa, Studio Abuse, Atelier Remoto, Iris Lacoudre & Luca Chanteau) to support the subgroups Water&Care, Food&Fire, Sun&Soil, and Material&Storage. The formation of the working groups had derived from prior conversations we had with the youth and staff on site around the kind of support structures they would need to improve their daily activities.
Setting up the social garden as base for the design and production of the workshop meant to gather and store resources and working tools for building, but also materials for ritualistic and care activities, ranging from food preparation and cleaning to places for encounters and rest. Deserting the traditional production and construction site and becoming an experimental, open air design studio allowed for poetic and playful situations, emblematic of the overall process of unlearning inherent to the project.
While ExSA offered one central base of experimentation open to a group of nomadic activists settling into a deserted space for the project Software-ing Spaces, Seeds Under the Snow was a group of nomadic activists hosted by a community in order to develop concrete tools and objects of support. Answering to different societal questions, with Software-ing Spaces relating more to spatial components inside a critical heritage and envisioning different futures for it, in the social gardens the central considerations ranged around what it takes to better take care of one another and the environment.
Throughout both projects, however, a clear message emerged: turning away, breaking the routine of productivity, and defining time differently to neoliberal definitions focussing on performance and results, allows ritualistic moments and social interactions emerge that transform into more nuanced moments of learning and creating. This aspect was particularly pronounced in the community garden experience, as the synchronization of communal rituals also required an understanding for the seasonal rhythms and needs of the crops and their soil as well as the fragile communities working with them. The life of things and places that shape the organization is inevitably reflected in the metabolism of resources and that can only be kept working in a state of mutual support and sustainable thinking. Considerations such as these are presented by Petr Kropotkin in Mutual Aid, criticizing that science supports the idea of survival of the fittest or “struggle of each against all” as “the leading principle of nature and of human societies as well.” Kropotkin contradicts these theses and reminds us of the everlasting cycles of nature and society: «Human society itself could not be maintained for even so much as the lifetime of one single generation» (1902, p.112).
Although these reflections were written as early as 1902, they sound more relevant than ever when one considers the debates on strengthening sustainability in the face of climate extremes and resource scarcity, as well as the social agreements we – as a society – should be making, not only across human generations but in all areas of life on earth. Intense project work offers a desertion of normed ways of thinking and furthermore puts theoretical knowledge into action, valuing experiencing and doing higher than abstract interactions. By situating projects into deserted places and communities, the groundwork of unlearning is set, which marks the second component towards new social pacts and visions thereof. In doing so, we want to challenge what Meister calls «over-intellectualised culture, which favours discourse over action and, for the same reason, which rejects from cultural life all those who haven’t learned, either at home or at school, the categories and the abilities for such discourse» (Meister, 1976, p.24). In action, people who get continuously excluded by the verbal, can naturally partake in the cultural formation and creation of vision.
Post desertion
The nature of the projects allows the nomadic character and the various phases of deserting to emerge as a quality rather than a limitation. Also other factors that are often-times considered as disadvantages, such as, in the case of ExSA, temporary installations and objects, we were trying to turn into qualities, seeking places and initiatives who would adopt the carefully designed software-ing devices, such as modular tables, moveable cooking stations, or the multi-functional tapestry. The objects crafted by Studio Corridoio, for instance, are now used in the common area of the youth prison in Milan. Even though we form temporary groups for our collaboration, therefore, we feel the spirit of the projects lingers on beyond the project durations and becomes a part of a community of like minded practitioners and activists, who are working towards new social pacts against exclusion and towards a non-binary way of thinking. In the diversity of the project protagonists and non-directedness of outcome, we further hope to form this community more in an understanding such as the one of Silvia Federici’s interpretation, forming “community” «rather as a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals» than «exclusive interests separating them from others» (Federici, 2018, p. 110).
Software-ing Spaces and Seeds Under the Snow are critical spatial interventions of different kinds and nature, both hyper-concrete and hyperlocal, and shaped by an embodied experience of groups of diverse people and their individual knowledge and backgrounds. The projects are of temporary nature, in a certain way, after finding deserted places and communities, after deserting traditional ways of knowledge exchange and building processes, after our interventions, we desert the sites and communities as well. Does that, then, minimise the effects and experiences hitherto described? What is at the aim of our project works is the idea of achieving something that could be described as empowered abandoning and referring to the understanding of leaving the site more autonomous on the one hand (through structures of support), and the group having collaborated in cohabitation more independently on the other, empowered through embodied experiences and through giving positive connotation to what is societally neglected or shunned.
In this sense, there are certainly different timelines at work, going beyond the intensive critical spatial practices, carried along though the use of the constructed objects on the one, and through the spirit of all participants bringing them to other professional or experimental project work. In this sense, the projects can be seen as an exercise in desertion towards appreciating interventions as sparks away from linear direction towards what Bo Bardi describes as “wonderful entanglements.”
Note
[1] In his book, Goodway seeks to fend off considerations of anarchy as something that should be shunned and explains that «anarchist tradition is characterized by such concepts and practices as autonomy, both individual and communal; mutual aid, or co-operation; organization from the bottom up; opposition to hierarchy; direct democracy or, at the very least, participatory democracy; federation; self-management; decentralization; anti-statism; anti-parliamentarianism; spontaneity; resistance to war; and increasingly, although with deep roots in the tradition, sustainability and ecology» (Goodway, 2012, p.12)
References
Aue S. et al. (eds.) Housing after the neoliberal turn: international case studies, First edition Spector Books (Wohnungsfrage / Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 5), Leipzig 2015.
Federici S., Linebaugh P., Re-enchanting the world: feminism and the politics of the commons, PM Press, Oakland, California 2019.
Goodway D., Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward, PM Press, Oakland, California 2012. Available a LINK
(Accessed: April 15, 2026).
Kropotkin P., Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution. (1902) Available at LINK (Accessed: April 15, 2026).
Meister A., Sotto il Beaubourg, Eleuthera, Milano 2008.
Ward C., Anarchy in Action, PM Press, Oakland, CA 2018.
Francesca Gotti and Yona Catrina Schreyer are members of So.No and the initiators and curators of “Software-ing Spaces” and “Seeds Under the Snow.” The non-profit collective “So.No – Società Nomade” (Nomadic Society) in Bergamo (IT) focuses on collective action within urban commons. So.No’s work is dedicated to cultural, social, and creative communities and aims to spark opportunities for them through detecting and activating spaces of and for commoning. They seek to put those in touch who are not connected or failed by systemic structures, empowering people to organize themselves.
Francesca Gotti, architect and researcher, explores empowerment through spatial interventions and simulations. She holds a Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano on critical spatial practices in South Europe. She was research fellow at University of Pavia for COSMO, about self-building practices. In 2021–22, she was assistant at USI Mendrisio for the design Studio Neotopia led by Leopold Banchini. Since 2015, she works in Bergamo on reuse of urban commons, recently as part of the association So.No.Società Nomade.
Yona Catrina Schreyer is an architectural designer and holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Urban Design from Politecnico di Milano. She is currently working as a Senior Scientist for the Department of Cross-Disciplinary Strategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Through her activities, she explores the relation between society and the design of the built environment, developing interdisciplinary experimental methods and alternative spatial practices in public space and urban commons. She’s a member of So.No Società Nomade and part of the ‘Ecologies of Care’ group, seeking to build new public imaginaries of care. She teaches in Milan and Vienna.