Edited books and journal issues by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
The Future Contemporary, 2023
This volume examines the entanglements between contemporary art practices, ecology, and non-human... more This volume examines the entanglements between contemporary art practices, ecology, and non-human subjects through contributions from scholars, art writers, critics, artist-researchers and designers. The collected essays reveal contemporary art’s potential to reorient epistemological and ontological coordinates amid ecological and existential crises, questioning human exceptionalism and the exploitative logics of extractivism and planetary industrialisation.
Central to the volume are issues of environmental degradation and violence, racial capitalism, colonial legacies, the emergence of the Anthropocene, in relation to the diverse terrain of contemporary art practices. Emphasising the agency of more-than-human collaborators, from animals to microbial ecologies, and from oceans to nuclear waste, these practices expose injustices, reclaim damaged ecosystems, and propose alternative ways of being in and with the planet.
Artist-researchers contribute perspectives that open up new avenues for knowledge creation in the disrupted landscapes of the Anthropocene, pointing to symbiotic relationships between humans and non-human entities that are only beginning to be explored. By sharing theoretical frameworks and languages, the artists’ and writers’ contributions make clear that the environmental crises impacting the ecosystems require new collaborations to build common epistemological grounds, and shared visions of planetary futures.
Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities, 2023
This volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, cov... more This volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music, and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda Musa, and Roberto Vacca. It broadens the horizons of both Italian studies and the environmental humanities by addressing a long-neglected genre, and expands understanding of relations between the ecological, the imaginary, and the sociopolitical.
The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities, and posthumanism. There is a wealth of insights regarding topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies, and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petromodernity through the construction of post-depletion futures.
Papers by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
This essay examines a corpus of Italian horror films set in Venice between the 1960s and 1980s, p... more This essay examines a corpus of Italian horror films set in Venice between the 1960s and 1980s, proposing the critical category of hydro-horror: a subgenre in which the aquatic element, while not central to the narrative, emerges as a source of a pervasive sense of the uncanny through its presence in modern urban environments. The specificity of the Venetian lagoon, with its amphibious nature and history of socio-natural transformations, provides fertile ground for the development of a cinematic imaginary of the monstrous in which water becomes a narrative and visual device that problematizes the boundaries between natural and artificial, revealing usually hidden urban metabolic processes. The essay explores how these films utilize Venice's aquatic materiality to articulate cultural anxieties related to urban modernity, offering a critical perspective on the ontological complexity of an irreducibly hybrid environment.
Literary Geographies, 2024
Science fiction and speculative literature, due to their future-oriented nature, have been increa... more Science fiction and speculative literature, due to their future-oriented nature, have been increasingly employed by artists and designers as speculative narrative tools, unlocking new functions for these genres. These practices can offer new insights on the literary-geographical dimension that emerges from analyzing and interpreting the represented spaces, both real and imagined, in a context that is not merely literary. However, what do these practices reveal of a space that is both real and deeply embedded in the Western literary imagination such as Venice? This short text focuses on two artistic experiments in situated reading and writing: How does the World End (for Others)? (2019-ongoing) by German artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, and La parabola della montagna (2023-2024) by Venetian artist Matteo Stocco. These projects demonstrate that collective, collaborative, and conversational experiences of reading and writing science fiction and speculative narratives can reveal the unconscious existential anxieties we associate with the spaces we inhabit daily.
Flux Magazine, 2024
Breve testo per Flux Magazine n.2 sul fiume Cauca in Colombia, le cui acque sono legate alla lung... more Breve testo per Flux Magazine n.2 sul fiume Cauca in Colombia, le cui acque sono legate alla lunga storia di violenza coloniale ed estrattiva del paese.
Building Common Ground: Ecological Art Practices and Human-Nonhuman Knowledges, 2023
Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann are Chicago-based artists and educators
whose interdisciplinary wo... more Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann are Chicago-based artists and educators
whose interdisciplinary work has evolved over the course of two decades.
Working across diverse media – from photography and video to performance
art – their thematic focus is as expansive as their choice of mediums. Their
recent work, titled How Does the World End (for Others)?, is a prominent inclusion in the 2023 exhibition Everybody Talks About the Weather, curated
by Dieter Roelstraete at the Fondazione Prada in Venice.
Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities, 2023
Il seme dell’uomo gives Ferreri the possibility to expand the scope of his cinema and to test its... more Il seme dell’uomo gives Ferreri the possibility to expand the scope of his cinema and to test its political potential to an unprecedented planetary dimension. Through the language of science fiction, subjects such as gendered violence, the struggle for reproductive power, and the commodification of life and nature are transposed from the historical setting of the Italian post-war economic growth to the time and the geography of the human species.
Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities, 2023
Science fiction's role as a medium for cognitive estrangement aligns closely with environmental c... more Science fiction's role as a medium for cognitive estrangement aligns closely with environmental concerns. This genre's practice of extrapolating future scenarios from the present intricately intertwines with the anticipation of outcomes arising from human-planet interactions. Science fiction's adeptness in crafting extraterrestrial ecosystems not only stimulates, but also enriches, reimaginings of our known world. Furthermore, the genre persistently confronts anthropocentrism by envisioning potential post-human or post-humanist realities. It achieves this through the depiction of non-human and even inorganic entities, exemplified by alien beings or amalgamations of animal and vegetal life, thereby granting agency to these diverse forms.
Enthymema, 2023
In his stories, Primo Levi presents contrasting planetary visions of Earth: one depicting it as a... more In his stories, Primo Levi presents contrasting planetary visions of Earth: one depicting it as an expanding technosphere made of entangled beings, and the other as a world of disparities impacted by the agency of a mutated humanity. But Levi's ideas of planet do not solely advocate for a utopian cosmopolitanism of all living beings; he critically probes the tension between technology's promises in industrialized societies and the worldview that sees Earth merely as an exploitable resource. Moreover, his stories emphasize the divisions and the contradictions created by the planetarization of the logic of industrial modernity. This essay analyzes selected short stories from Vizio di forma, seeking to unpack Levi's intricate engagements with planetary concepts and the emergent idea of a terrestrial condition. Central to this exploration is how Levi's planetary vision reflects the inherent tensions between the individual and the collective, and between different scales and ways of existing.
Elephant & Castle, 2022
Ice cores are fundamental techno-scientific components of the visual culture of the Anthropocene.... more Ice cores are fundamental techno-scientific components of the visual culture of the Anthropocene. Through the eloquence of ice, the Anthropocene sets the tone for its own narration, one made of impending apocalypse, planetary boundaries, and irreversible tipping points, while, at the same time, attesting for the "lively materiality" of ice, and of its past and present states. This essay analyzes and determines the narrative agency and the semiotic complexity of ice cores within the contested terrain of the Anthropocene thesis and presents two recent art-science collaborative projects exploring the aesthetic dimension of ice cores: Susan Schuppli's Ice Cores (2019) and Giulia Bruni and Armin Linke's Earth Indices (2022).
Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices, 2022
In this essay, I argue that the novel Dissipatio H.G. is constructed as a (geological) crime scen... more In this essay, I argue that the novel Dissipatio H.G. is constructed as a (geological) crime scene in which the protagonist and the reader participate in a forensic analysis of the world without us.
Venice and the Anthropocene. An Ecocritical Guide, 2022
On the Interplay of Images, Imaginaries and Imagination in Science Communication, 2022
The visual arts have played a major role in producing knowledge and constructing critical images ... more The visual arts have played a major role in producing knowledge and constructing critical images of the Earth and the Anthropocene, focusing on climate change and the interactions of humans and non-humans, species extinction, natural history and Earth phenomena on multiple scales (Davis and Turpin 2015; Demos 2016; Reiss 2019). Several galleries and contemporary art institutions have designed exhibition-led inquiries into the Anthropocene and socio-ecological visualizations, also in collaboration with ecologists, architects, urbanists and designers. In this context, natural sciences museums and institutions have constructed, in collaboration with artistic research, special exhibits and visual explorations of key aspects of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, mass extinctions, postcolonial ecologies, and climate-induced migrations.
Within the increasingly vast corpus of art-centered representations of the Anthropocene and climate change, a few visual artists have started to reflect on the new planetary visuality introduced by the Anthropocene paradigm and the struggle for describing the massively dispersed phenomena associated with it. Specifically, aerial and satellite images seem to occupy an important place in displaying the progression in both time and space of the effects of climate change. Aerial photographs of glaciers and the Arctic, for instance, have become ubiquitous in climate discourse and as this type of visualizations «take advantage of the long standing appeal of aerial earth images» (Houser 2014, 327), like for example NASA’s epoch-defining photograph Blue Marble, they have become intrinsically associated with a general sense of wholeness, urgency and environmental crisis. The awareness of the obsolescence and inadequacy of photography as an artistic medium for these tasks is recent, as many early representations of the Anthropocene consisted of aerial-photography projects depicting large minerary sites, melting glaciers, and other distinctive landscapes normally associated with anthropogenic climate change.
Lagoonscapes. The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities., 2021
The essay situates Venice's struggles against the cruise ship industry within a larger framework ... more The essay situates Venice's struggles against the cruise ship industry within a larger framework of resistance against planetary extractive capitalism, emphasising the role of local art-activist initiatives in denouncing the social and the ecological degradation caused by the cruise ship presence in Venice. In the first part, the concept of extractive tourism is introduced and analysed in relation to the case of Venice and the cruise companies' economic model. The operations and infrastructure of cruise tourism produce extractive relations that entangle and exploit tourists, local communities and the natural environment. The Author examines how mass tourism has aggravated the environmental and social issues of the city of Venice and its lagoon. In the second part, the essay presents a number of artistic projects, specifically by visual artists Eleonora Sovrani, Gli Impresari, Banksy, and Elena Mazzi. These artworks can help us visualise the failures of the current urban development model of the tourist economy, while also exposing the nefarious effects of extractive capitalism on the well-being of the lagoon ecosystem and the human and non-human subjects cohabiting in it.
The Cinema of Ettore Scola, 2020
Trevico-Torino Viaggio nel Fiatnam (1973) by Ettore Scola, was largely produced by the director a... more Trevico-Torino Viaggio nel Fiatnam (1973) by Ettore Scola, was largely produced by the director and completed with funds from Unitelefilm, the film production company of the Italian Communist Party. The historical moment immortalized by Scola represents the intersection of three macroevents that involve numerous passive actors and agents: the multiplication of the city space (which includes the political and the material spheres), the displacement and management of groups of people (a shift that required both migrants from the north and Turinese natives to adapt), and the proliferation of the automobile (both as a commodity and as the main product of Italian factories). The consequences of these are still visible in contemporary Italian life, even if the early 1970s cannot be considered the generative moment for all these phenomena. Given its dual fctional and documentary form, we can approach Trevico-Torino as an ideal document for understanding the interaction between such assemblages in the age of the Anthropocene.
Fargione, Daniela e Concilio, Carmen (eds.), Antroposcenari. Storie, Paesaggi, Ecologie. Bologna, Il Mulino, 2018
Terroir and Winemaking in the Anthropocene. Notes on a potential environmental humanities approac... more Terroir and Winemaking in the Anthropocene. Notes on a potential environmental humanities approach for the study of wine.
In the last decade, ecocriticism has emerged and quickly spread as one of the most prominent meth... more In the last decade, ecocriticism has emerged and quickly spread as one of the most prominent methods of literary analysis. In this review article, a brief history of ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities is presented. Specifically, the article introduces the reader to the seminal and fundamental texts that constitute an essential ecocritical reading list. In addition, it presents the most important currents of the discipline and the state of Italian ecocriticism. In the second part, two recent volumes (Iovino 2016 and Turi 2016) are reviewed.
La Fusta, 2014
An ecocritical reading of Vittorio De Seta’s Sicilian
documentaries.
Book Reviews by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
MLN, 2023
Book review of Toxic Matters: Narrating Italy’s Dioxin by Monica Seger published by University of... more Book review of Toxic Matters: Narrating Italy’s Dioxin by Monica Seger published by University of Virginia Press, 2022
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Edited books and journal issues by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
Central to the volume are issues of environmental degradation and violence, racial capitalism, colonial legacies, the emergence of the Anthropocene, in relation to the diverse terrain of contemporary art practices. Emphasising the agency of more-than-human collaborators, from animals to microbial ecologies, and from oceans to nuclear waste, these practices expose injustices, reclaim damaged ecosystems, and propose alternative ways of being in and with the planet.
Artist-researchers contribute perspectives that open up new avenues for knowledge creation in the disrupted landscapes of the Anthropocene, pointing to symbiotic relationships between humans and non-human entities that are only beginning to be explored. By sharing theoretical frameworks and languages, the artists’ and writers’ contributions make clear that the environmental crises impacting the ecosystems require new collaborations to build common epistemological grounds, and shared visions of planetary futures.
The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities, and posthumanism. There is a wealth of insights regarding topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies, and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petromodernity through the construction of post-depletion futures.
Papers by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
whose interdisciplinary work has evolved over the course of two decades.
Working across diverse media – from photography and video to performance
art – their thematic focus is as expansive as their choice of mediums. Their
recent work, titled How Does the World End (for Others)?, is a prominent inclusion in the 2023 exhibition Everybody Talks About the Weather, curated
by Dieter Roelstraete at the Fondazione Prada in Venice.
Within the increasingly vast corpus of art-centered representations of the Anthropocene and climate change, a few visual artists have started to reflect on the new planetary visuality introduced by the Anthropocene paradigm and the struggle for describing the massively dispersed phenomena associated with it. Specifically, aerial and satellite images seem to occupy an important place in displaying the progression in both time and space of the effects of climate change. Aerial photographs of glaciers and the Arctic, for instance, have become ubiquitous in climate discourse and as this type of visualizations «take advantage of the long standing appeal of aerial earth images» (Houser 2014, 327), like for example NASA’s epoch-defining photograph Blue Marble, they have become intrinsically associated with a general sense of wholeness, urgency and environmental crisis. The awareness of the obsolescence and inadequacy of photography as an artistic medium for these tasks is recent, as many early representations of the Anthropocene consisted of aerial-photography projects depicting large minerary sites, melting glaciers, and other distinctive landscapes normally associated with anthropogenic climate change.
Book Reviews by Emiliano Guaraldo Rodriguez
Central to the volume are issues of environmental degradation and violence, racial capitalism, colonial legacies, the emergence of the Anthropocene, in relation to the diverse terrain of contemporary art practices. Emphasising the agency of more-than-human collaborators, from animals to microbial ecologies, and from oceans to nuclear waste, these practices expose injustices, reclaim damaged ecosystems, and propose alternative ways of being in and with the planet.
Artist-researchers contribute perspectives that open up new avenues for knowledge creation in the disrupted landscapes of the Anthropocene, pointing to symbiotic relationships between humans and non-human entities that are only beginning to be explored. By sharing theoretical frameworks and languages, the artists’ and writers’ contributions make clear that the environmental crises impacting the ecosystems require new collaborations to build common epistemological grounds, and shared visions of planetary futures.
The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities, and posthumanism. There is a wealth of insights regarding topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies, and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petromodernity through the construction of post-depletion futures.
whose interdisciplinary work has evolved over the course of two decades.
Working across diverse media – from photography and video to performance
art – their thematic focus is as expansive as their choice of mediums. Their
recent work, titled How Does the World End (for Others)?, is a prominent inclusion in the 2023 exhibition Everybody Talks About the Weather, curated
by Dieter Roelstraete at the Fondazione Prada in Venice.
Within the increasingly vast corpus of art-centered representations of the Anthropocene and climate change, a few visual artists have started to reflect on the new planetary visuality introduced by the Anthropocene paradigm and the struggle for describing the massively dispersed phenomena associated with it. Specifically, aerial and satellite images seem to occupy an important place in displaying the progression in both time and space of the effects of climate change. Aerial photographs of glaciers and the Arctic, for instance, have become ubiquitous in climate discourse and as this type of visualizations «take advantage of the long standing appeal of aerial earth images» (Houser 2014, 327), like for example NASA’s epoch-defining photograph Blue Marble, they have become intrinsically associated with a general sense of wholeness, urgency and environmental crisis. The awareness of the obsolescence and inadequacy of photography as an artistic medium for these tasks is recent, as many early representations of the Anthropocene consisted of aerial-photography projects depicting large minerary sites, melting glaciers, and other distinctive landscapes normally associated with anthropogenic climate change.
Italian National Hydrocarbons Authority) hired several
emerging filmmakers to produce hundreds of high-quality
movies documenting the process of oil extraction in Italy and
abroad. Intended as both celebratory and educational films,
the ENI documentaries aimed to promote oil as the source of
energy that could finally modernize Italy. Guaraldo argues
that today these films can be essential for understanding the
“ideology of petroleum” in its making, and for opening a
discussion on the troubled relationships between the
environment, colonialism and resource extraction in Italy.
The work specifically responds to the narrative proposed by the Leleque Museum, an anthropological museum opened in 2000 on lands owned by Benetton. The museum’s operation is problematic, as it portrays the Mapuche people as an extinct culture rather than one that is alive and active in the disputed territory, effectively ‘musealizing’ their memory and material culture.
Mazzi addresses this conflict by engaging in dialogue and supporting the dense network of relations that the Mapuche community has been consciously curating for many years. This approach involves building and maintaining relations between different political and cultural subjects while also being implemented in their cosmovisions as a form of radical mediation between land, human, and more-than-human beings.
Silver Rights will be related to Poc and Encounters, two new video works by the artist on view at Ca' Pesaro, in the context of the series of solo exhibitions "Italian Polyphonies," curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese.
The workshop will begin with a conversation with artist duo Geissler and Sann, showcasing their installation "How Does the World End (for Others)?" currently on view at Fondazione Prada. Scholars Alison Sperling from Florida State University and Chiara Xausa from the University of Bologna will delve into the connections between climate fiction, speculative arts, and the role of imagination in shaping our perceptions and actions.
How can creative practices contribute to new ways of thinking about climate futures? What do speculative approaches reveal about the variety of possible worlds and futures? And how can narratives in climate fiction orient our collective efforts toward greater social and climate justice?
By bringing together critical thinkers and creative practitioners, this workshop seeks to employ a multidisciplinary approach to speculative imagination, effectively bridging academic and artistic discourse
Our guest speaker is Prof. Elizabeth Povinelli (Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies – Columbia University) who is one of the leading scholars in the analysis of late liberalism. She has published The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, both for Duke University Press.
Prof. Elizabeth Povinelli will briefly introduce her paper The Three Figures of Geontology, the first chapter of her upcoming book Geontologies: a Requiem for Late Liberalism.
This panel invites papers on Italian theater and performance studies with an emphasis on modern, contemporary , and experimental texts. We welcome submissions that focus on the works of essential personalities and movements in XX century Italian theater, such as Carmelo Bene, Edoardo Sanguineti, Luca Ronconi, and the avant-gardes, but also contemporary views on theatrical texts from previous decades and centuries. At the same time, we strongly encourage the submission of papers on current companies, writers, directors, and shows such as Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Romeo Castellucci, Fanny & Alexander, Emma Dante, etc., and on the works of artists that defy the conventional boundaries between theater and video-art, visual experimentation, and performance art, such as Zapruder Filmmakersgroup, Carloni & Franceschetti, Studio Azzurro, Paolo Gioli, etc.
Please send a 200-300 abstract and a short bio to Emiliano Guaraldo (guaraldo@live.unc.edu) before December 31st. Please let organizer know if you need any audio-visual equipment.
ITALY BY DESIGN looks at the art of cultural transmission working selectively on the material success of the invention of Italy in the last 500 years and combining key concepts in Material and Intermedial Studies with innovative practice-led course delivery formats. Mini MAXXI is student-led and each event has an Autonomous Learning Group (ALG) in charge.
ALG1 Decolonising Minds and Methods
ALG2 Change by Design
ALG3 Unsustainable Ctd.
Course Concept and Guest Speakers Series © Federica G Pedriali
Viticulture is an intricate network of human and non-human actors, and in which the interaction between the concepts of life and non-life plays also an important role. Grapes, farmers, agro-capitalism, climate change, indigenous and foreign yeasts, soils, bacteria, and even prehistorical animals, are all fundamental agents when crafting those stories that we unknowingly drink in a glass of wine.
What it means for a grape to stray away from its original landscapes? How can the terroir, meant as a system of human and non-human relations, survive the challenges imposed by anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene? What is the strategy for survival of grape varieties in contemporary agro-capitalism? These are some of the questions that I intend to address in my work. The ultimate scope of my paper is to open up the study of wine to the current Environmental Humanities theoretical and methodological developments, as I believe that it has the potential to help us rethink the agency of agricultural and botanical subjects in the context of human / non-human networks.
In response to (and also co-forming) the crises and the critical debates surrounding the planet’s well-being, visual, performance, and media artists are increasingly in dialogue with scholars and researchers within environmental sciences, humanities, and social sciences interrogating the geo-physical and the socio-ecological dimensions of contemporaneity. By engaging science and climate fiction genres as source material, contemporary artists integrate, challenge, and expand associated conventions and narratives in their work. The prevalence of dystopian, utopian, catastrophic, and regenerative imaginaries—alongside reflections on current socio-ecological conflicts through science fiction tropes—demonstrates how global visual artists across mediums are substantively engaging with future-oriented discourse.
This proposed special issue aims to understand how contemporary artists utilize and transform science fiction elements to address concerns about the present, envision alternate realities, and critique current socio-ecological, technological, and political issues. It will explore the intersection of science fiction with visual arts, examining how this confluence shapes our understanding of the Anthropocene epoch and its associated challenges.
The proposed special issue will ideally host contributions from scholars and researchers working on science fiction studies, visual culture, art theory, visual studies, and adjacent disciplines, as well as research pieces by artist researchers, practitioners, and curators.
relationship with the forms of knowledge reproduced by geoscientific research and communication. In the visual, media and performing arts, the Anthropocentric paradigm has, at times, activated challenging processes of archival construction, research, and revision, which tackle traditional modes of collecting and classifying. These processes have enabled both a surveying gaze on the geophysical phenomena composing the natural history of the planet and a renewed interest for the complex relationships that entangle the forms of life cohabiting in it.
The extensive deployment of this gaze by artists, activists and art/science practitioners has contributed to build a visual and material inventory of epochal transformations, hyperobjects, extinctions, sedimentations, ecologies and endangered ecosystems. This ongoing inventory (re)presents and re-enacts a univocal planetary nature through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene thesis and, at the same time, highlights the urgency
to rethink taxonomies as open systems of knowledge and understanding.
From this perspective, the Archival/Anthropocenic paradigm has also been challenged and problematized by artists stemming from the global south, as well as belonging to indigenous and racialized communities.
Specifically, critical archival approaches to the Anthropocene thesis have been exposing and denouncing the colonial roots and the problematic genealogies that constitute European natural history and its institutions and discourses. In this context, an understanding of the planet as a pluriverse, or as a ‘world made of many worlds’ has emerged. Such perspectives force a re-configuration of natural history as conflictual and heterogeneous, opposed to the unifying and totalizing view of the geological Anthropocene.
This double issue of Holotipus welcomes contributions on the relationship between contemporary archival processes and the visual, media and performing arts, and between the scientific production of knowledge and aesthetic practices. At the same time, in order to represent the complexity and potential of the debate around these themes, the issue aims to also include critical perspectives within or as response to the aesthetic framework established by the Anthropocene thesis and by Western natural history. Particularly welcomed are contributions from interdisciplinary scholars working the fields of the visual arts, philosophy, and the environmental humanities across media and geographies, as well as from artists and designers engaging with these topics.
Some themes may include:
- Orality and archival processes in the Anthropocene;
- Critiques of anthropocentrism and of the role of technology in constructing different images of the planet;
- Indigenous forms of knowledge in relation to non-human life;
- Marginalized, colonized, and oppressed natural histories;
- Acts of re-worlding and alternative eco-political imaginations;
- Denunciations of ecological and epistemic violence;
- The relationship between scientific visual communication and the visual arts;
- The geological and stratigraphic imagination of the Anthropocene;
- The processes of classification, fossilization, sedimentation;
- Ecofeminist and environmental justice approaches to natural history;
- Alternative taxonomies, toponyms, and nomenclatures;
- Enactment and pre/re-enactment as artistic practices in the context of planetary change and the ecological crises;
- The visuality of scientific disciplines such as paleontology, botany, zoology, systematics within the contemporary arts;
- Earth beings and non-Western ontologies of nature;
- Artistic and curatorial practices for decolonizing natural history and its institutions;
- Methods and practices of ecocritical Art History;
- Queering of archival processes, methods and procedures;
- Speculative zoology and botany;
- The divide between living and non-living matter;
- Pluriversal imagination and artistic practices.
In order to be considered for publication, abstracts of 400 words (in English), together with five key words and a short bio, must be sent, in Word or PDF format, to holotipus@holotipus.it by 30 September 2022. The editors of the issue will contact the contributors to communicate if their proposal has been accepted by 15 October 2022. Once confirmation of acceptance of the abstracts has been received, articles in English of maximum 5000 words (footnotes included) must be sent by 31 December 2022. To see Holotipus editorial norms: https://www.holotipus.it/publication-norms/.
All articles will undergo a double-blind peer review process.
EVENT OVERVIEW
While Primo Levi is mainly known for his painstaking and harsh books about his imprisonment in Auschwitz, he also wrote two collections of short stories that can be labelled as science fiction: 'Storie naturali' (1966) and 'Vizio di forma' (1971). A chemist by training, Levi wrote these stories at a time when science fiction was still perceived as unworthy of attention by Italian intellectuals—to the extent that 'Storie naturali' was initially published under a pseudonym. In both books, Levi uses science fiction to investigate the ethical implications of technological progress and probe its hidden and inherent flaws while adopting a tone that was only apparently light. The eerie effect reached by many of these short stories is due to a strong clash: the literary genre was considered superficial and disengaged by the vast majority of Levi’s contemporaries, and yet the writer addresses crucial existential questions in his narrations of clones, intelligent technologies, mutant animals.
By drawing attention to Levi’s contributions in science fiction, this one-day conference aims to contribute to reshaping the scholarly reputation of this genre within Italian Studies and to question Levi’s perception vis-à-vis his position within the hierarchy of genres. This event brings together some of the most renowned scholars who have explored the intersections between his work and science fiction. The speakers will dialogue with early-career researchers and established Levi scholars to foster the debate on this new area of research and explore it from an interdisciplinary perspective.