With the fall of the colonial empires after the Second World War, a new type of control began to spread, however: “We passed from colonial military domination to financial and economic domination, in such a way that the machinery of power no longer needed to be opaque physical structures but could develop through transparency and dematerialization. [...] The new configuration of domination is represented by architecture that is open, brilliant, transparent, interconnected, mediated by corporations, bank headquarters and information screens displaying abstract share values. The Foucaultian closing of institutions is transformed into a control that is remote, abstract and not localized.”

Even if the architecture of power is changing, the detrimental effects that it continues to produce in colonized territories do not change; examples of this are still evident today, as shown in the Inequalities exhibition. In Cities, for example, Andrés Jaque shows how the skyscrapers in Hudson Yards, Manhattan owe their glossy sheen to titanium extracted from Xolobeni, in South Africa, where the mining makes the sandy soil light and unstable, impeding the cultivation and livability of the area: the absence of dust on the buildings of power leads to a lethal dust on the other side of the world.

In the second text that I wish to return to, sociologist Bianca Beccalli analyzes the relationship between difference and inequality, taking as an example the difference between genders. Beccalli reconstructs the phases that this concept has passed through in the feminist movements: at the end of the 19th century, the difference between men and women was emphasized, and was considered a diversity to be protected; in the 20th century, however, the value of this difference was relegated to second place, superseded by the search for formal equality, in the workplace, in rights and in political and public representation. In the 1980s, however, gender difference regained its place in feminist discourse, serving as an essential tool in combating the presumed neutrality of the universal Subject.

“This only lasted for a short time, however," Beccalli argues, "since the critical impulse against general explanation, the practice of ‘deconstruction’, the focus on studying the specific and the different, undermined that appeal to difference that had been emerging in the 1980s almost as a new essentialism: nowadays, feminist research describes the many different stories of women of different ethnicities, different sexual preferences and different cultures [...] In contrast with the protagonism and schematism of white, educated, heterosexual feminists, the women's movement has refocused attention on the different stories of black and Hispanic women, descendants of slaves, lesbians, and women who are diverse in a variety of ways, through the interweaving of race, class and historical events."

If Beccalli initially affirms that “we are not different because we have more or less of the same commodities, but because we are different”, it later becomes clear that “some differences also correspond to inequalities”, and this remains true today. Difference in gender, for example, continues to create inequalities and Federica Fragapane's installation for Inequalities states some unequivocal facts: unpaid care workers are still mainly women, who devote five hours a day to care work on average, compared to the two hours that men devote to it; women earn less for the same job, and only just over half of women have their own personal bank account.

One of the maps curated by Maurizio Molinari also shows the strong global imbalance in political representation: most countries are still governed by men. As Beccalli points out, within gender discrimination there exist other forms of oppression linked to ethnicity, class, sexual orientation or gender identity. The Puerto Rico pavilion offers an example, describing the murder of a homeless black trans woman, the victim of a violence that interweaves various interconnected lines of discrimination; finally, Fragapane's data also show that in the USA, the risk of pregnancy-related death is higher for black women, native Americans or indigenous Alaskans.

In the face of these data on inequalities, we naturally ask ourselves what can be done and how we should respond when it is the system itself that produces injustice. De Solà-Morales answers this question by outlining three possible responses: submission, that is, passive acceptance; delinquency, or purposeless destruction; and finally resistance, which he himself indicates as the preferable way to respond, developing the idea of “an architecture of resistance”, capable of striking the system from within. Indeed, De Solà-Morales suggests:

“We need to go back to the myth of Odysseus and Polyphemus: from inside the cave, from inside the power network, we need to sense the escape routes, to guess where the cracks are. Then we need to develop strategies, violent acts that open up gaps, create stoppages, reinforce differences and cause breakdowns. The military machinery in the art of resistance is often rudimentary and marginal, like the burning stick that Odysseus brandishes. We need to exploit the temporary sleeping of the giant to attack him in his weakest point, the eye, which represents, in an image of poetic brilliance, the very essence of control.”