In Naples there are many abandoned newsstands. For years they have been meeting points, small neighborhood posts where you can stop and read the newspaper headlines, exchange a few words, feel part of a community. Then came the publishing crisis and they remained there: empty, forgotten, almost invisible.
Many look like monuments, many others are a mess of rust and dirt. What to do with it? In recent months, the municipal administration had allocated more than 40 thousand euros for the forced removal of newsstands considered to be in the most critical conditions and thus several structures were removed in many streets of the city. But it’s not enough.
What if we went back to their original mission? That of giving and providing information. Someone is trying to give them a voice back.
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It is Liberi Edizioni and it is an artistic-editorial project born from the idea of Nicola Angrisano together with a group of activists, artists and independent journalists. The objective is simple and very powerful at the same time: to transform abandoned newsstands into spaces of counter-information, urban art and civil participation. All with temporary and non-invasive installations.
Large posters appear on old newsstands that recall the front pages of newspapers, but are dedicated to topics often ignored by the mainstream debate: wars, human rights, Palestine, environmental crisis, repression of dissent, events such as that of Julian Assange or Mario Paciolla.
The idea was born during the mobilizations to ask for Assange’s release. And it is almost symbolic that everything starts from newsstands: places that once represented daily access to information and which today become urban surfaces through which to question what “freedom of the press” really means.
And this is perhaps precisely the most beautiful heart of the project: restoring social function to structures that now seemed like urban relics. Where before there were only lowered shutters, today words, images and questions reappear. Newsstands are once again places that speak to people.
The activists of Liberi Edizioni say they want “reclaim the media“, bringing information off the screens and into the streets, into the neighborhoods, into the spaces crossed every day by ordinary people. Also a response to the feeling that social networks, rather than making us truly participate, have transformed us above all into passive users.
But in Naples all this takes on a particular meaning. Because here the abandoned newsstands are not removed, or not all of them: they remain there, like silent wounds of the city. Liberi Edizioni chose not to hide them, but to transform them into something new. And perhaps this is precisely the most authentic form of urban regeneration: not erasing what has been left behind, but giving it back meaning, memory and possibility.
HERE is the map of newsstands.
