Acampada24 – Archaeological view

On May 13, 2024, Acampada 24 began in the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge gardens at the University of Pisa. Students, who have been mobilizing for months in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to demand a strong stance from the University against the policies and actions of the State of Israel, have set up tents.

This encampment is part of broader national and international demonstrations that, in recent weeks, have seen university students mobilize in many cities worldwide. Additionally, it aims to promote a new and different way of understanding the University as a space where attitudes and methods of coexistence, education, and social awareness can be renewed.

We recognize this form of protest as a historically significant moment for the University of Pisa and its community, the city of Pisa that hosts it, and student movements in general.

We believe it is important to document its development and memory archaeologically, focusing not only on the materiality it is producing and will leave behind; the archaeological perspective can offer a different interpretation and narrative of objects, spaces, temporalities, and relationships.

We hope to create a collective documentation of the Pisa encampment’s material traces and construct, together with the students experiencing it, a collective narrative of this experience. This will help raise awareness within the university community in all its components and the community outside the University.

Update 1. What happened
Throughout May, the protest encampment grew, expanded, and organised. The students promoted and organised numerous discussion and information activities in an assembly-like atmosphere, striving to involve other university community members and the leadership. An extraordinary Academic Senate meeting was secured and held jointly with the Board of Directors after a confrontation with the Dean of the University of Pisa. On June 13, the session took place at the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica, open to a representative group of students and all those who carried motions to be discussed. The agenda included the request to rescind agreements between the University of Pisa and Israeli universities and collaboration agreements with defence industry companies. The session, which was also streamed online, saw broad participation but rejected any motion regarding the agenda topics.
Students dismantled the encampment between June 14 and 15, taking down tents and all the established setups. Simultaneously, they occupied one of the perimeter buildings of the garden where the encampment had been located, at St. Maria 46 Street, where they established the occupied space SUMUD to continue their protest actions.

Update 2. What has been done
During the encampment, our project on the archaeology of the present was introduced and explained to the students.
The evolution of the encampment spaces was photographically documented, monitoring the continuous transformation of the traces left behind. The murals progressively appearing on the garden’s perimeter walls were documented using photogrammetry.
In collaboration with the students, several video-recorded testimonies were collected. The day after the encampment was dismantled, the garden area underwent a surface survey mapping every trace, both the presence of tents and the objects used.

Update 3. What we are doing
In these months, we are working on systematising, analysing, and interpreting the data and processing all the collected artifacts. We hope to share the archaeological story of this Pisan Acampada soon.

Team
Scientific coordinator: Francesca Anichini
Maria Elena Ambrosanio
Salvatore Basile
Francesco D’Antoni
Gabriele Gattiglia
Chiara Giovannetti
Massimiliano Puntin

Contact: francesca.anichini@unipi.it