The space-times and afterlives of bonifica in contemporary Italy

Symposium: ‘The Space - Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in contemporary Italy’ Location: Villa Rossa, Florence, Italy – Room 12 & 13 Date: Tuesday 23rd March 2022, 2:30pm-6:30pm 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 18th 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 todays’ 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. 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. The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence SCHEDULE 2:30pm - 2:40pm Welcome Daniele Profeta 2:40pm - 3:00pm Introduction(s) Irene Peano SESSION I - The political ecologies of bonifica and its ruins 3:00pm - 3:30pm “The Colonial Continuum of Land Reclamation” - Andrea Bagnato 3:30pm - 4:00pm “Reclaiming domestic and colonial environments: theories and practices of Italian bonifica in 19th and 20th centuries” - Roberta Biasillo BREAK 15 mins SESSION II – Spaces and architectures of bonifica: Memory and affect, violence and resistance 4:15pm - 4:45pm “Pedagogies of ‘emplacement’: fascist colonial architecture and rurality as analytical method to deconstruct Southern modernizations” - Emilio Distretti 4:45pm - 5:15pm “The bonifica as narrative: anthropological perspectives on the afterlife of the bonifica integrale” - Elena Miltiadis BREAK 15 mins SESSION III – Discussion 5:30pm - 5:45pm Response Irene Peano 5:45pm – 6:15pm Round Table Moderator: Daniele Profeta 6:15pm – 6:30pm Q+A The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence ABSTRACTS AND BIOS The Colonial Continuum of Land Reclamation Andrea Bagnato This project proposes to think of land reclamation in terms of a “colonial continuum”, starting from contemporary labor and environmental conditions in the sites of Italian bonifica. The question is how the violence of the drainage process was embedded in the reclaimed soil – such that it has filtered through to the present day, even when bonifica itself is a distant memory for most people. A continuum of violence may be thought along four axes: labour violence (the conditions of drainage workers in the past, and farm workers today), climate violence (the effects of wetland disappearance and CO2 emissions), social violence (bonifica as primitive accumulation), geopolitical violence (bonifica as a nationalist and imperial project). I will substantiate these claims by presenting research and fieldwork on the northern Venetian Lagoon. Land reclamation in this part of Italy stands out for its historical depth (early works date to the mid 16th century); for having been made into a poster site of sorts by the Fascist regime (as evidenced by the 1922 congress held in San Donà di Piave); and for the relative abundance of written sources, compared to the southern regions. Ultimately, I will try to argue that the historical phase of modern land reclamation (ca. 1880–1960) prefigures the current intertwinement of climate change, land grabbing, and racial exploitation; and that addressing the material consequences of bonifica is necessary in order to imagine less extractive and anthropocentric ways of being in the landscape. Andrea 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 two public assemblies at MAAT, Lisbon (fall 2021) and an upcoming exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid (May 2022). Andrea is the 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. The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence ABSTRACTS AND BIOS Reclaiming domestic and colonial environments: theories and practices of Italian bonifica in 19th and 20th centuries Roberta Biasillo Reclamation projects are key objects to analyse human-nature relationship: by looking at environmental transformative dreams and everyday strategies of environmental cooperation, historians can highlight different conceptualisations of nature, divergent political uses of the environment, variable degrees of social inclusivity. Environmental reclamation enterprises have been implemented by all past societies around the globe, though only some regions have developed a crucial set of tools and policies dealing with environments considered to be under-productive. In Europe, large stretches of the Italian peninsula represent some of those regions. Moving from scholarly definitions of Italian bonifica, this presentation illustrates different theories and practices of bonifiche through the case-studies of the Pontine Marshes between 1871 to 1928 and Libyan coastal area between 1934 to 1943 (under Italian rule since 1911). This presentation adopts an environmental history perspective and a comparative approach: it draws attention to physical elements and engages with domestic and colonial contexts spanning liberal and fascist eras. The two presented casestudies allow for a discussion on the power of reclamation projects to shape social, political and economic aspects of “marginal” areas and offer the opportunity to reflect on ruptures and continuities of Italian reclamation in modern times and in colonial and domestic spaces. 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. The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence ABSTRACTS AND BIOS Pedagogies of ‘emplacement’: fascist colonial architecture and rurality as analytical method to deconstruct Southern modernizations Emilio Distretti With this intervention, I present some work in progress, that will reflect on the research/practice work that is undertaken for the second edition of the Summer School on Difficult Heritage, in Borgo Rizza, Carlentini, Sicily – organized by Critical Urbanisms (Basel) and DAAS-Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies (Stockholm). I use examples of fascist colonial architecture and rurality from Eastern Sicily to demonstrate methods that bring spatial, material and natural contexts into the practice of producing and evaluating knowledge about the question of “modernization” of the South of Italy. In order to show the value in ‘emplacement’ in teaching and learning, this presentation offers an overview of a wide variety of elements – including human, material, natural, technological factors - that accompanies different phases of state sponsored modernizations of Sicily: from the exploitative system of latifondo, through the fascist bonifiche and urbanism, the post-war Sicilian agrarian reform and mechanization, depopulation, inward and outward migrations, to the violent industrialization and infrastructural sprawling that for decades have scarred the ecosystems around Priolo, Augusta and Melilli in the Eastern coast of Sicily. By telling these entangled histories, I will make the case for emplacement as a method of pedagogic innovation that centres the body and knowledge of students/researchers/local communities by using architecture, the rural and materiality in teaching and learning. I will use the colonial fascist architecture of Borgo Rizza and its surrounding rural worlds to examine past and present relationship between context, self, body, and knowing in a continuous, reflexive, and comparative process, as a way to deconstruct inherited world views around “modernity” and “modernization” in the South. Emilio Distretti is a researcher, writer and an educator. He lives in London and currently he is Postdoctoral Fellow at Urban Studies, at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Distretti studied Philosophy at the University of Bologna (Italy) and holds a Ph.D. in Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation from the School of Art and Design at Portsmouth University (UK). Prior to joining the University of Basel, he was Postdoctoral 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. Distretti’s research takes on interrelated avenues on the politics of space, architectural heritage, Italian fascist colonialism, postcolonial and decolonial politics in the Mediterranean (Italy, North Africa and the Levant) and in the Horn of Africa. He has previously taught at the School of Architecture, Metropolitan University in London and at SOAS at the Department of International Studies. He collaborates with DAAR - Decolonizing Architecture Art Research. The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence ABSTRACTS AND BIOS The bonifica as narrative: anthropological perspectives on the afterlife of the bonifica integrale Elena Miltiadis How is the bonifica of the Pontine Marshes remembered today? What role does it occupy in national and local historical narratives? How is the bonifica as narrative collectively represented, transformed, negotiated, and contested? The paper explores these questions from the point of view of Latina, a city founded in 1932 on reclaimed marshland by the Italian fascist regime. By analysing ethnographic data collected between 2015 and 2016, I consider how the bonifica becomes in Latina a multifarious entity, whose meaning is continuously re-elaborated and performed in both the public and private realms and in the negotiation of its fascist past. I focus on three ethnographic examples: public commemorations held to remember Latina’s foundation, personal and biographical memories connected to the bonifica, and the trope of the marshes (the palude), which permeates the existence of the city despite the land reclamation. In exploring the aforementioned questions and ethnographic examples, this paper provides a commentary on contemporary representations of the bonifica, on the ambiguous absent presence of the fascist past in Italy, and on the malleability of history and of historical narratives. Elena Miltiadis is an honorary research fellow at Durham University, UK. Her PhD 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. The Space – Times and Afterlives of Bonifica in Contemporary Italy | Syracuse Architecture in Florence