Project Description
Paola Piscitelli
FSC-Harvard Fellow 2026-27
I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow, currently affiliated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University, the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg, and the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) at Politecnico di Milano.
As an urban ethnographer and documentary filmmaker, my work explores the intersections of mobility, migration, youth, and urban transformation, with a particular focus on the diverse urban Souths. Combining ethnographic research with audiovisual practice, I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Egypt, South Africa, Mozambique, and Italy, and produced films in Milan, Naples, and Mindelo.
My publications include Mobile Urbanity (Planum, 2018), Città, sostantivo plurale (Feltrinelli, 2019), and Atlante delle città. Nove (ri)tratti urbani per un viaggio planetario (Feltrinelli, 2020).
My audiovisual works include Radio Riders (2020), Io non vedo il mare (2022), The Space of Inequality (2025), an audiovisual installation featured in the 24th International Exhibition Inequalities at Triennale Milano, and Waithood (2025), my first feature-length documentary, premiered at Festival dei Popoli, selected for FESCAAAL, shortlisted for the Libero Bizzarri Award, and awarded at the Festival Internazionale della Cinematografia Sociale – Tulipani di Seta Nera, while now continuing its journey.
Working across scholarship, filmmaking, and visual experimentation, I am drawn to marginal, diasporic, and often overlooked lives whose capacity to imagine, endure, and transform their circumstances challenges established social and spatial boundaries. My research and cinematic practice are driven by a desire to accompany processes of becoming and social change, tracing how people navigate uncertainty, cultivate aspirations, and reshape the environments they inhabit. More broadly, I seek to render visible the often opaque forces that produce inequality and organize urban life, bringing ethnographic inquiry into dialogue with sensory experience and cinematic ways of knowing, perceiving, and engaging with the world.
FSC Works
Mo
Paola Piscitelli
At the Port of Hamburg, Mo is one cog in the machinery of global logistics. He monitors the automated systems that orchestrate the relentless flow of goods. Yet for the past two years he has been haunted by a troubling question: whether he, in some way, has contributed to the deadly logistics that killed his brother in his homeland and destroyed the house on whose rooftop he used to play the oud at sunset.
But goods have no face. Invisible and ubiquitous, they circulate across the globe and vanish into containers, leaving behind elusive traces and responsibilities that seem impossible to pin down.