Across balconies. Interaction in porous home territories in the Italian lockdown (original) (raw)

Balconies, verandas and courtyards are part of our homes, shared with household or condominium fellows, but extending into the public space for the visibility they allow as compared to the indoor. They constitute the porous (Benjamin and Lācis, 1978) borders of the home, and configure as liminal spaces in the "geography" of private, parochial and public realms of social life (Lofland, 1989). Such geography has been reconfigured by and during the lockdown following Covid-19 outbreak. With social life restricted to the house (although many were alone at home) and its liminal spaces, balconies and courtyards became both more used as the only functional outdoor space, and more visible, as many more eyes were at home, possibly watching. They became home for the public realm, where several interactional practices were enacted to grant and acquire privacy (civil inattention, "undervoicing", doing oblivious), and as much were used to mitigate the loneliness engendered by home confinement ("stakeouts" for acquaintances, phone/video calls, interaction with pets). The paper considers such a reconfiguration based on the ethnography I conducted from the balcony of an apartment in Parma, Italy.