Home » The former “Loran” military base in Lampedusa will become an international study center for peace

The former “Loran” military base in Lampedusa will become an international study center for peace

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The former “Loran” military base in Lampedusa will become an international study center for peace

Until 1994 its 190-meter antenna operated by the US military dominated the Mediterranean and allowed radio navigation in an integrated system with other similar antennas installed in other countries. Then the “Loran” base in Lampedusa, installed in 1972 in Capo Ponente in the westernmost and uninhabited part of the island, was left by the Americans, entrusted to the Italian Air Force and abandoned. Off. For a long time only a former military site remained which for the island, outraged in 1986 by two missiles launched from Gaddafi’s Libya and ended up in the sea a short distance away, represented an era to be forgotten. Now, however, the former Loran base in Lampedusa is preparing to become a symbol of peace and integration from a symbol of war. It will become, in the programs of the municipality of Lampedusa and Linosa and with the involvement of the Sicilian Region and the ministries of culture and defense, a study center for peace “able to involve international institutions and associations, voluntary networks, institutes of research on geopolitics, the world of art and international culture, and also intended to host major events ”, as the Municipality and the Region made known. The architect Stefano Boeri will transform it so radically, who has already been on the island with some of his collaborators and the consultants Emanuel Ingrao of Shifton and Silvia Basta of Fondazione Maimeri, and has visited the former base. «When in Lampedusa we talk about migration – says architect Boeri – we talk about lives in motion, stories, identities that have met over the centuries, leaving deep cultural and social traces on this island in the center of the Mediterranean. If it is true that identities are built in the relationship with the other, Lampedusa, the island of stories, can become the planetary epicenter of a reflection on the destinies of humanity “.

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In recent days, a protocol was signed between the Municipality of Lampedusa and the Sicilian Region. In the projects, on the island there will not only be the International Peace Study Center housed in the former Loran base. We also think of an auditorium, a museum with a digital archive to host works and also “performative acts and narratives on the theme of large migratory flows and their interrelations with the great challenges of climate change and poverty – as the promoters explain – . There will also be a system of laboratories and places of study and residence for scholars, researchers, artists and witnesses of the great phenomenology of migration that will be obtained from the reuse of the disused military forts that surround the island “.

“Transforming a symbol of war such as a former military base into a symbol of peace is an initiative of great value that expresses courage and trust in a better world – said the mayor of Lampedusa, Totò Martello -. The commitment of Lampedusa and its community on the humanitarian front is recognized and appreciated internationally but the time has come for our island to play a proactive role so that, from the center of the Mediterranean, a dialogue of peace can be built. able at the same time to face and analyze the phenomenon of migratory flows in all its complexity ».

“The idea of ​​a museum of migration can only start from the collection of these stories, often desperate and difficult, which one must know how to intercept and place at the center of the largest archive of lives in the contemporary world“, added Boeri.

The former Loran base about ten years ago, when the migratory phenomenon from the coasts of Africa exploded, was temporarily transformed into a reception center for unaccompanied minors which, due to their legal status assigned by international laws and conventions, they cannot stay in the same structures as adults, as in this case the hotspot in the Imbriacola district. A use that went on for a few years, before the former base returned to being uninhabited and, as time passed, increasingly in a state of abandonment. Two years ago, a rumor had also spread on the island that the Interior Ministry wanted to make it a second hotspot for migrants, but it was the mayor himself who denied that rumor.

“The establishment of a Study Center that becomes an international reference point and meeting place for scholars of the migratory phenomenon – said the president of the Region Nello Musumeci – will offer the opportunity to enhance Lampedusa’s vocation to welcome and, moreover, it will make it possible to transform the experience of which the archipelago is the cradle into a collective and shared heritage ».

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