Global Mini-Series Symposium: The Space - Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy

Syracuse University in Florence
Piazza Fra’ Girolamo Savonarola, 15, 50132 FIorence, Italy

If you are planning to participate in person, please note that spaces are limited. To secure one, please email the organizers at dprofeta@syr.edu and ipeano@syr.edu.

To gain access to the event weblink, register below.

The symposium will be the culminating event of the year-long research of our Architecture Abroad Program on the infrastructural and socio-ecological spaces of Bonifiche. Prompted by the ambition of infusing notions of Italian canon with context, we challenged the idea of hermetically sealed architectural objects and shifted our attention from buildings to territories. As a continuation of the seminar that Irene Peano taught in the Fall ’21 titled “The rise and fall of ‘rural urbanism’ in modern Italy”, this event will highlight contemporary approaches to the study of eco-systems and the importance of keeping human, more-than-human and mechanical components within the same frame of analysis. Whether defined as anthropo-, capitalo- or plantationo-cene, these understandings of the current epoch emerge from the inextricable intertwining of multiple (spatial, symbolic, affective, material) dimensions, and immediately summon geological as well as human temporalities.

In this symposium, we propose to approach such topical issues from the vantage point of the bonifiche, as a series of discourses, assemblages and interventions that took shape in Italy (including its colonial possessions) since the end of the 18^th century. Mobilizing multiple bodies of knowledge (from hydraulic science and agronomy to criminology and racial anthropology), plans to redeem, cleanse, reclaim and exploit land, water, flora, fauna as well as people have left significant (if at times unintended) marks on today’s landscapes, memories and imaginaries. With this symposium we aim to identify and understand a few instances of such traces, opening up a conversation about how to speculate on possible alternative futures.  

Speakers

Credit: Gaia CambiaggiAndrea Bagnato has been researching architecture, ecology, and epidemiology since 2013, under the long-term project Terra Infecta. Among its outcomes are a book on infected landscapes in Mediterranean Italy (forthcoming by Humboldt Books), as well as lectures and an essay series. Together with Ivan Lopez Munuera, he recently curated the project Vulnerable Beings, which comprised a two public assemblies at MAAT, Lisbon (fall 2021) and an upcoming exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid (May 2022). Andrea is co-author of A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (Columbia/ZKM, 2019), and has worked as a book editor for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Forensic Architecture, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. 

Roberta Biasillo is an assistant professor in contemporary political history in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. She earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History at the University of Bari (Italy) and has been a postdoctoral researcher in several European institutions – the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and the European University Institute in Florence. Biasillo’s research interests lie at the confluence of environmental history and political history. She has focused on how marginal environments – such as forests and wetlands – embedded in Italian nineteenth century liberalism and on the role of African colonial environments in shaping Italian fascist state and empire. Biasillo has recently submitted a monograph in Italian reconstructing the history of the Pontine marshes between 1870s and 1920s from an environmental microhistory perspective. Her co-authored volume Mussolini’s Nature. An Environmental History of Fascism is forthcoming in 2022 from the MIT Press. Biasillo is currently working on a research project on the global environmental history of colonial Libya.

Emilio Distretti is a researcher, writer and an educator, living between London and Basel. Previously, he was research fellow at the Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant) in East Jerusalem and the Director of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences (AQB), in Abu Dis in Palestine. Emilio’s research and writings take on interrelated avenues on the critical and decolonial re-use of colonial and fascist architectural heritage in the Mediterranean (Italy, North Africa and the Levant) and in the Horn of Africa.

Dr. Elena Miltiadis is an honorary research fellow at Durham University, UK. Her thesis (Miltiadis, 2020) explored the emotional afterlife of an Italian city called Latina, built by the fascist regime in 1932. Miltiadis is interested in the ways contested pasts permeate the life of communities who elaborate, negotiate, and give meaning to their existence through, against, and beyond their contested identities.

Irene Peano (PhD Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) is currently an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the same Institute as well as at the University of Bologna, and a visiting professorship at the University of Bucharest. Her work has always focused on processes of labour migration (with particular reference to sexual and agricultural work) across Italy, Nigeria and Eastern Europe. She explores mechanisms of control, containment, extraction and resistance, through methods which place engagement, solidarity and participation at the centre of her research. Currently, she is working on a monograph that investigates the material, spatial, symbolic and affective stratifications of racism and more generally of labour containment, and of forms of resistance against them, by reference to the development of Italian agro-capitalism since the late 18^th century. By tracing archival, historical, genealogical and mnemonic traces, as well as erasures and processes of ruination, her current work-in-progress aims to unsettle widely held perceptions of the current state of migrant labourers and of Made-in-Italy agrifood production.