Il rumore del silenzio / The noise of silence

February 28, 2026 by kiccovich

Kabul, 28 Febbraio 2026

Il silenzio della notte è denso, pieno di attesa surreale – che sia minaccia o sia sollievo

I sensi restano in allerta, con i peli delle braccia dritti e le orecchie tese

Suoni familiari e confortanti e suoni ostili e sconosciuti che ti lasciano lì, sospesa, a cercare di capire cosa ti aspetta, cosa viene dopo

Il silenzio della notte è pieno di sussurri che si mescolano all’eco dei pensieri

La lingua asciugata dalla sospensione, il cuore che batte a ritmo scombinato

L’inconscio sviluppa la facoltà di catalogare una tassonomia uditiva che nessuno dovrebbe essere costretto a riconoscere

Il silenzio delle notti ostili è denso, pieno di strascichi appiccicosi

E quando il pieno si svuota, gli occhi si chiudono e il corpo riposa

***

Kabul, 28 February 2026

The silence of the night is dense, full of surreal anticipation – wondering whether it will be a threat or relief

The senses remain alert, with the hairs on the arms standing straight and the ears straining

Sounds that are familiar and comforting and sounds that are hostile and unknown they leave you there, suspended, trying to understand what awaits you, what will come next

The silence of the night is full of whispers that mingle with the echo of thoughts

The tongue dried by the suspension, the heart beating in a disjointed rhythm

The unconscious develops the ability to catalogue an auditory taxonomy that no one should be forced to recognise

The silence of hostile nights is dense, full of sticky aftermaths

And when the fullness empties, the eyes close and the body rests

Quanto / How much?

January 8, 2025 by kiccovich

Quanto ci vuole per arrivare dove dobbiamo andare?
Quanta pena riusciamo a sopportare e quanta ne dobbiamo ignorare?

Da 460 giorni il senso di umanità si è frantumato e c’è ancora chi continua a guardare dall’altra parte.

Stamattina ho visto il video di un maestro di musica di Gaza che accordava la chitarra col ronzio dei droni israeliani che volavano minacciosi sulla scuola. Quanto sono profondi la capacità di resistenza, la forza di ridere, il potere di sperare, l’abilità di immaginare?

Il ronzio dei droni è terrorizzante, è pericolo in potenza, un pericolo possibile e imminente che non serve si materializzi per fare paura. Le braccia si contraggono e le orecchie restano allerta. Quanto tempo ci vuole per risanare le crepe che il terrore genera nell’anima? Quante generazioni ci vogliono per smettere di immaginare la paura?

Col genocidio ridotto a statistica, di quanto abbiamo bisogno per svegliarci e realizzare? Quante vite congelate sono necessarie per smettere di far finta di niente?

E quanto amore e quanta solidarietà per rimanere umani?

***

How much does it take to go where we have to go?

How much grief can we bare and how much should we ignore?

In the past 460 days the sense of humanity has shattered and there is still someone who continues to look away.

This morning I watched a video of a music teacher from Gaza who was tuning his guitar to the buzzing of the Israeli drones that were menacingly hovering over the school. How deep are the capacity to resist, the strength to laugh, the power to hope, the ability to imagine?

The buzzing of drones is terrifying, it is looming danger, a kind of danger that is potential and imminent and does not have to materialise to be scary. Arms get contracted and ears stay alert. How much time does it take to mend the cracks that terror etches in the soul? How many generations are needed to stop living in fear?

With the genocide reduced to mere statistics, how much do we need to wake up and realise? How many frozen lives are necessary to stop going about life as if nothing?

And how much love and solidarity do we need to remain human?

Before and after

March 15, 2024 by kiccovich

A few weeks ago, a person I have known for many years wrote me to say that reading my bulletins they felt that I was quite disturbed by the situation in Gaza. The message caught me by surprise and my first response was to react piquedly – of course I am disturbed and so are many of the people who are close to my heart; how can one possibly not be disturbed and go about life as if nothing in a moment like this?

The message stayed in my mind and kept me thinking.

It has been 28 weeks since 7 October and this period marks for me a clear before and after. A line I heard from a recently released film buzzes in my head: “What has Gaza changed for me? My entire being.”

There is an easy risk of sounding rhetorical here, yet I think that this is true for me as well: more in the sense of an unveiling than in terms of actual change, Gaza has changed my entire being. The struggle for Palestinian self-determination has been an integral part of my political formation and has been a fundamental element of my being in the world for over thirty years. In this respect, therefore, there is little change.

So then, what has Gaza changed in me?

Gaza confronted me with myself in unexpected ways.

Not to take a stance is a privilege I have no right to. Not running risks to stand for my ideas is a privilege I have no right to. I have no right to look away and pretend I don’t see what’s happening.

As someone who writes for a living, I have the ethical duty to use clear and precise words. An assassin is an assassin; a genocide is a genocide; a massacre of innocents is a massacre and not an incident; a child does not starve to death randomly, it is killed by a precise strategic machination.

Silence and indifference are forms of complicity that I no longer want to endorse. They are choices I have no respect for, so I no longer intend to pretend that we are all friends as before.

In a moment of such blinding grief, however, there is a community that is taking shape. A community that is both tight and wide, made of people who are nearby and far away, of people known and unknown, who now perceive a clear demarcation of before and after, who identify with this irrevocable change and support each other in light of such chasm.

One for the most shattering images I have seen in these past 28 weeks – I believe it will stay with me forever – is that of a date seed that is sprouting between the fingers of a person who is buried under the rubbles. It is both a horror and a miracle, a devastating metaphor that needs no explanation. It is a glimmer and an omen of the indomitable strength of resistance and solidarity.

Spectacles

May 22, 2019 by kiccovich

It has been a few days since one of my students at the Institute is having a hard time reading and writing and his school results have gone down. We asked a few questions and we discovered that he broke his spectacles and his family does not have money to buy new ones (about 30$ between frames and lenses).

Another one is always tired; his eyes are red, and he struggles to focus. I called him to my office and asked him what was going on. He said that there is no problem, and everything is normal. For him normal means living in a tiny room behind the woodworking workshop of his cousin. After school he works there to earn a bit of money and then in the evening he goes for tuition. His family is in Kuduz, probably the most dangerous part of the country right now. I asked him to come and stay at the students’ dorm, but he declined the offer: I think he fears that if he moves out of his cousin workshop he’ll lose the opportunity to earn a little.

There is a boy who is emotionally unstable, his parents tell him he’s good for nothing and he only finds peace of mind when he draws. He told us: “People say I am crazy.” At the Institute, he’s just a boy like anyone else: he’s found his little world and a bit of tranquillity.

Another student is distracted and absent-minded, we catch him often staring at the void. His brother – to whom he resembles immensely – has been killed in a bomb-blast last year, it has recently been the first anniversary. How can we help him restore an emotional balance?

I have been back in Kabul only for three days and these are the stories that welcomed me. Yet again, a unique opportunity to put my priorities in order and remember not to take anything for granted.

How do we remember?

February 8, 2019 by kiccovich

How do we manage the emptiness that the loss of a loved one creates so as to preserve the smile that characterised the time spent together?

How do we remember? How do we honour the memory of a person who dedicated her life to tell stories that are too difficult to hear? How can we forget just as much as it is needed to survive? How can we suspend the urge to understand so as to respect the inexplicable choices of a friend?

We had not been in touch for a while, but she was prone to long silences – it happened every time she was immersed in writing. We live scattered around and yet interconnected – six months go by and you don’t realise it until it is too late.

Annie spent her life embracing the world – an embrace so compassionate and open that sometimes the world ended up suffocating her. She was a good listener – she listened without reservations or prejudice. She gathered stories that would inevitably leave deep marks. She felt responsible for the words that were gifted to her.

There is a man, maybe not fully in his right mind, in a rough neighbourhood in Karachi, he lives in a cemetery with a wall full of graffiti. She wanted us to write his story together. I may have to go look for him soon. And carry with me her desire to always make an honest and generous space for all unheard voices.

And carry with me her desire to always make an honest and generous space for all unheard voices.

Annie Ali Khan (1980-2018). In memoriam.

The things that I don’t know

August 28, 2018 by kiccovich

Yesterday the cousin of one of our teachers has been killed in a targeted assassination. It felt like one of those stories that you read on the newspaper and you think they will never be part of your life because they belong to a foreign elsewhere. One of those stories that are beyond the ordinary and have nothing to do with the normality of the everyday.

I am here to run a school. Before I started, my idea of what my routine would look like included the revision of teaching methods, the achievement of artistic excellence, grades and disciplinary notes. What turned out to be a part of my ordinary administration is also the management of situations that are extraordinary, alien and emotionally destabilising – which, however, in a country at war are sadly integral to daily life.

Impermanence and transience are difficult to conceive as some of the inevitable ingredients of our life; they are difficult to digest as a force that roots you in the present rather than as a windstorm that erases any sense of direction.

The concept of resilience is often abused and quoted far too frequently and light-hardheartedly. But it is moments like this, when all the things that I don’t know lay bare, that reveal the mysterious strength that we have inside and we’re often not aware of. It is an immense force that helps keeping things together; that helps continuing to look ahead; a silent strength that protects the desire – as Vittorio Arrigoni used to say – to stay human.

Liberticide

August 19, 2017 by kiccovich

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“It happens slowly, irreparably, slyly. What was the title of that song? Killing me softly. That’s how freedoms are killed – for the most.”

I write on Chapati Mystery about the slow, inexorable curbing of freedoms.

You can find the full article here.

UR/Unreserved

July 28, 2017 by kiccovich

UR/Unreserved is an arts project stemming from the collaboration between maraa arts collective and Anish Victor. UR/Unreserved embarks on a train journey to investigate the margins of negotiation of identity in contemporary India.

The trigger for the project was an SMS that circulated in Bangalore in 2012 targeting specifically the population of the North Eastern states of India. The message warned the receivers that, had they not left immediately, they would have paid the consequences. The SMS proved to be fake, however, many people fled overnight, by train, fearing for their lives.

Interrogating what it means to belong, how people identify, what are the processes of representation connected to identity, what are the markers that “give away” who people are. These are fundamental questions that urgently need to be addressed in the current political context in India.

Eight young artists from Karnataka, Kerala, Assam and Kashmir will travel for a month in sleeper coaches and unreserved train compartments engaging fellow travellers in conversations around their own experience of individual and collective identities. Through performative techniques, magic tricks, songs and games they will facilitate the possibility of an exchange around a subject that is now too risky to address with strangers. The material gathered from these conversations will become part of public happenings and of a travelling exhibition.

To make this important arts project possible there is an ongoing crowd-funding campaign.

To support Unreserved by contributing to cover the production expenses, you can give your contribution here.

L’esercizio della responsabilità

July 21, 2017 by kiccovich

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Storicamente, i periodi di crisi socio-politiche sono caratterizzati da grandi movimenti popolari di protesta e rivendicazione dei diritti. L’enfasi sulla dimensione di rivendicazione da una parte implica la presupposizione di un potere che ascolta, dall’altra sposta la necessità dell’azione al di là di chi protesta.
E’ forse anche per questo che un documento tanto importante quanto la Carta Universale dei Doveri e delle Responsabilità è praticamente sconosciuta. A seguito di un processo consultivo internazionale che ha coinvolto esperti, politici (fra cui Leoluca Orlando), intellettuali (inclusi Dario Fo e Gianni Vattimo) e rappresentanti di comunità, la Carta è stata redatta a Valencia nel 1998 in occasione del 50º anniversario della Dichiarazione Universale dei Diritti Umani sotto il patrocinio dell’UNESCO. La Carta è una versione speculare della Dichiarazione dei Diritti Umani e funziona quasi da contrappunto: a tutto ciò di cui abbiamo diritto, fa da contraltare quello che dobbiamo fare per renderlo possibile.
Premessa fondamentale del documento è la distinzione di piani fra doveri e responsabilità. I primi hanno un valore di impegno morale, che si traduce in vincolo legale attraverso l’assunzione di responsabilità: se non espletiamo a pieno i nostri doveri per garantire i diritti di tutti, siamo perseguibili penalmente.
In tempi come questi, per esempio, è importante ricordare che al sacrosanto diritto al libero movimento fa eco il dovere all’ospitalità – in particolare verso chi è dislocato a causa di guerre o carestie – nell’ottica di un’equità non solo formale, ma sostanziale.
L’articolo 38 della Carta si concentra su doveri e responsabilità tanto degli individui che delle comunità di creare le condizioni e sostenere le arti e la produzione culturale.
Lavoro da oltre dieci anni nella promozione culturale, rivitalizzazione del patrimonio immateriale e sostegno agli artisti in paesi in conflitto. Fra le ragioni che muovono il mio agire c’è la consapevolezza di una profonda interconnessione tra urgenza, diritto e dovere alla libera espressione. Alla luce della Carta, la mia attività professionale è la risposta a una chiamata all’assunzione di responsabilità per cui ciò che facciamo è parte di una tutela dei diritti tanto individuali che collettivi.

Cultural Heritage, Conflicts, and the Map

July 19, 2017 by kiccovich

On the 27th of July at 6 pm, I will speak as part of GeoBLR at the Mapbox office in Bangalore about Cultural Heritage, Conflicts, and the Map.

For the past 15 years I have been working in the promotion and revitalisation of cultural heritage and practices in countries in conflict. Mapping can be an important device to support locating archeological remains as well as living traditions.

The talk explores the challenges and opportunities of mapping in this context. It further addresses the issue of the value of (cultural) objects on the map. As there are many questions and no definitive answer, I hope that the presentation will turn into an engaging collective discussion.

Find the Mapbox office here on the map.

Francesca Recchia

Tag Archives: violence