Rethink themselves with Saints among the ruins

The 2009 L'Aquila earthquake (6.3 Mw) hit a city of 70.000 inhabitants with more than 70 small localities. Although the state of emergency is officially over, today the old historical centers of all these villages are still closed and people are still living in 19 New Towns and several villages of wood housing units, dislocated in a huge area. The policy of managing the emergency, doesn't include (at the moment) the return of displaced people to their homes and allows us to explore through anthropological tools the ways in which the relation between places and subjects is working through cultural memory. My paper is based on a 6 months field research in one of these villages (in 2011) and tries to understand the processes of performing memory of lost places through the post-seismic revival of a Saint feast. Its idea, organization, networks and places involved and its own performance offer a special view on the creation of some tactics of subjects in facing the reconstruction of an imagined community after the disaster. The relation between time of trauma and displacement, and the need for a future and emplacement reveal how affect to places has to be made explicit through the activation of a dialectic between past and present. It is possible so, through these current practices of memory and emplacement, that call into question some specific symbols of the community boundary, to analyze the self-representation of the subjects of their community through the performance of the affection for their “physical and emotional structures of routines holding people in places”, in the construction of a new collective history after the disaster.