At the Ex-MOI housing occupation, with the inhabitants and member of the Refugees and Migrants Solidarity Committee De Marchi did a participative installation in 2019 just before the clearing out of the buildings.

Intended the Ex-MOI as a work of art for the social creativity and human behaviour, based on solidarity, that characterised the life in four buildings of around 1.200 people coming from 28 African countries, she proposed to install a banner hung on the top balcony of one block of flat, to claim to be recognised as an artwork and not only, as politician and media do, as a dangerous site. The reflection focused on the sentence ‘Works of art are thought things, but this does not prevent their being things’ by Hannah Arendt from “The Human Condition”, and its power to be representative, and someone suggests that it speaks about the never-ending of that reality due to the strength of people relationship: exactly the following sentence in the Arendt’s text, that became the title of the work.

The urgency of this work stemmed from the fact that this place was criticised as dangerous or viewed as a model by intellectuals. What the inhabitants claim is that the reason to squat is the search for the dignity of which the institutions have dispossessed them. It is not a theory. Or, it is not just thought.