Author: bsbrocca_site

Baci Sospesi has been alive for more than six years. It has travelled from Italy to Portugal, the UK and Germany. It has entered museums and public spaces, gathered messages from strangers and carried anonymous voices across borders. But its story still exists in fragments: the Flag, the Manifesto, 35 audio portraits, three permanent interactive installations, several temporary appearances, photographs, messages, memories and the experiences of the people who helped me make it happen.

I have decided to write it down.

I am writing the living history of Baci Sospesi, from its beginnings during Italy’s first lockdown in 2020 to the forms it has taken through the people and places it has encountered. The book will bring its scattered story together and help me understand what the project has become and where it can go next.

I am returning to the first sketches, the memories, the decisions that changed the project over time and the questions that remain open.

The book follows Baci Sospesi as it continues to evolve and invites readers to enter that movement. Through the questions it raises and the connections it creates, each reader can take part, in their own way, in what the project becomes next. Baci Sospesi began as a socially engaged art project about love and separation. It has grown into a living practice of resisting indifference and creating connection. This book is part of that growth, and so are its readers.

I am writing it now, and it is coming very soon.

For too long, Gaza has been reaching us through images, testimonies and voices that should be impossible to ignore. Yet even the unbearable can gradually become part of the background. News moves on, people become exhausted, and silence begins to grow around something that has not stopped happening.

Some months ago, I received a message from Sami Abu Omar, a Palestinian journalist and activist who lives in Gaza and collaborates with ACS. He asked me whether we could do something through Baci Sospesi to help keep attention on Gaza.

His message stayed with me. Baci Sospesi was born from the need to create connection where separation is imposed, and to make space for human voices that might otherwise remain unheard. Sami’s question therefore felt both natural and urgent.

He later proposed that I collaborate with ACS, Associazione di Cooperazione e Solidarietà, an Italian NGO that has been working in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine for many years. After speaking with the ACS team, I decided to begin developing Baci Sospesi for Gaza.

The campaign will collect testimonies and messages for Gaza and publish them through a dedicated page on the Baci Sospesi website. That page will also include a direct link to an ACS crowdfunding campaign dedicated to the project, allowing people to donate directly to the organisation and support its work.

None of this is online yet. I am building a new Baci Sospesi website with a dedicated page. Doing it properly is taking time. But the project has begun.

At its centre is a simple decision: to turn sleepless attention into connection and connection into concrete support.

At the end of August 2026, Baci Sospesi arrived in Berlin for its first Sprouting Lab, an intensive three-day workshop developed on this occasion with my dear friend, the artivist Lorena Terzi (KulturNest).

I did not want the participants simply to reproduce the familiar red forms of the project. I wanted us to begin with what lies beneath them: the Baci Sospesi Manifesto, which brings together the project’s core values of empathy, courage, connection, hope and resistance. Through conversation, writing, linocut and a collective paste-up, those values became new images and words that first entered Berlin’s public space and then travelled beyond it. The prints have already reached Turkey, Italy and Poland, and more countries will soon receive them.

The workshop is over, but my conversation with Berlin is not. I would like to return with a temporary site-specific installation conceived during the workshop by the artist Lexie Yu (Chener). Together with Lexie and Lorena, I would like to explore what happens when people encounter Baci Sospesi unexpectedly in a public space. Do they stop? Do they recognise an invitation? How do they approach and interact with the work?

This next phase is a work in progress.