Paper short abstract:

Borrowing from Bakhtin’s concept of "chronotope", this paper reflects on the lively connectedness of ruins in the Po river Delta. It argues that ethnographic encounters with material failures from the past disclose critical and thriving perspectives related to present and future challenges.

Paper long abstract:

The landscape of the Po river Delta has been described by many writers and photographers as a dreamlike, abstract, and somewhat spectral world. The Po branches flow across endless croplands, floodplains, and wetlands molded by the entangled histories of human and non-human works (Chakrabarty 2009)—histories of power, exploitation, defeat, and abandonment. Modern state interventions and development plans have left many traces of unaccomplished scenarios: ruins are an essential part of the Italian "Deltascape" (Krause&Harris 2021) and the third landscape (Clément 2004) they materialize is a persistent testimony to the political failures from the past. Yet, the collapsed farmhouses, disused draining pumps, derelict warehouses, and forgotten water locks are not silent leftovers to locals: they open up ontological dialogues across non-linear scales that blend time and space, memories and expectations, claims and dilemmas (DeSilvey&Edensor 2012). In this paper, I draw inspiration from Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary concept of "chronotope" to reflect upon ethnographic encounters with the ruins of the Po river Delta. I argue that local questions to, interactions with, and understandings of material remnants express the «intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships» (Bakhtin 1981) that have not simply faded in the past. In the Po river Delta, the chronotopes of failure disclose critical perspectives on both today’s politics of space and the accelerated environmental changes (Van Aken 2020) exacerbated by climate change. Moreover, these chronotopes allow anthropological research to sense the world of local possibles (Lefebvre 1958) and the way they might unfold in the future.

Paper short abstract:

This proposal concerns the natural ruins of the Fiemme valley, in the aftermath of the Vaia disaster. The several crashes sites in this Alpine valley witness a vulnerability culturally inscribed in the landscape, making the management of this forest commons even more arduous for the community.

Paper long abstract:

With more than 1 million and 400 thousand m³ of wood, the Fiemme Valley is one of the most devastated in all of northern Italy by the passage of Vaia (October 2018). The storm acted as a revelatory crisis, pointing out the unsustainability of precise historical ways of inhabiting the valley. The Fiemme territory is haunted by past residual agency, deeply rooted in the forests (Martellozzo 2021). The Vaia disaster resulted from the cultural remodelling of two landscapes: the forest one, implemented on a local scale through monoculture practices (Scott 1984); the atmospheric one, implemented on a global scale with the emission of greenhouse gases. For this reason, this problematic past has not been exhausted over the centuries but continues to influence the present. The confrontation with this legacy is made more complex by the nature of the forest heritage, which substantially constitutes a commons (Ostrom 1990). It is managed by the Magnificent Community of Fiemme, an institution that has played a crucial role in modelling the landscape over the past seven centuries. The vision of devastated mountain slopes and ruined forests deeply affected the inhabitants, rekindling their interest in the environmental management of the valley. But the several crash sites that mark the valley are by no means empty ruins: they represent symbolic and ecological palimpsests (Zanini & Viazzo 2020), in which the community is trying to inscribe a new future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses cultural interventions in post-industrial sites in Southeast Europe. It argues that the aesthetic, political, and temporal trajectories that are activated by commoning spaces of industrial ruination offer a potential to re-think the very imaginations of socialist modernity.

Paper long abstract:

De-industrialisation and the post-1990s capitalist rules left small rural towns and villages in Southeast Europe empty and decayed. The former industrial plants have now turned into spaces of modern ruination. Their state of abandonment gave the opportunity to many local artists and DIY initiatives to reclaim post-industrial ruins, insert them in their artistic practices or transforming them into spaces for practising the commons.

Drawing on the concept of the commons, this paper explores the legacy of post-industrialism in Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Acknowledging that industrial ruination is an important post-socialist legacy, the paper proposes an alternative entry point in understanding socialist modernity, as well as its utopias and failures, using as an entry point the visual and material cultures of industrial decay.

What kind of knowledge production can contemporary interventions bring to sites of modern ruination? More crucially, how can we common and reclaim anew spaces that bring both with their materiality, and with their discourse, multiple historic and political connotations? In thinking around these questions, the paper proposes the term “affective commoning” as a concept-tool to describe an emerging body of practices that are centered around affective political action by revisiting spaces and temporalities of ruination.

Paper short abstract:

In Sicily empty buildings are the material ruins of a violent, capitalist mafia order. Many were transformed into migrant workers’ shelters. Institutional actors, activists and workers interpret this in contrasting ways. Ruins thus embody a contested politics of hope and freedom at Europe’s edge.

Paper long abstract:

In southwestern Sicily, empty or abandoned structures stand as the physical ruins of an old, but still-present order, characterised by a violent, capitalist-minded mafia and decades of emigration. These structures have affective resonance on local denizens, who describe them in terms of feelings of depression and frustration.

Recently, some structures have been repurposed as shelters for migrant workers. This is the work of local activists and government institutions, but sometimes it is the workers who self-settle. For these actors, motivations and visions differ, sometimes in contrasting ways: for local activists, repurposing abandoned buildings and transforming them into shelters for migrants is part of a work of hope and meaning-making without which, many say, they would already have emigrated north. For actors working in institutional instances of re-appropriating buildings sequestered from the mafia to use as shelters, the transformation represents an act of legality and civilizing, privileging State control over the chaos of mafia violence and corruption. For migrant workers, self-settling in abandoned buildings is felt as a tension, between freedom and autonomy, but also feelings of being marginalized and vulnerable to many kinds of violence.

Based on eight months of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily, this paper compares these actors’ reasons and visions for transforming empty buildings into shelters, placing them in the complex socio-political history of southwestern Sicily. It shows how ruins can function as the material and affective embodiment of contested politics of hope and freedom, in a place which locals themselves describe as a European periphery.

Paper short abstract:

The cokery of Orgreave, a few miles from Sheffield, was the scene of one of the harshest clashes between miners and police during the 1984-85 strike. After the closing of the colliery, a redevelopment plan is trying to cancel the traces of the past events, but not without opposition.

Paper long abstract:

The plain surrounding the cokery of Orgreave, a few miles from Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, was the scene of one of the harshest clashes between miners and police during the year-long 1984-85 strike against Margaret Thatcher's plans to shut down dozens of coal mines across the country to rationalise the industry.

During the so-called "battle of Orgreave", mounted police corps charged the picketing miners, causing a violent confrontation that ended with 123 wounded and 71 miners charged with the accusation of riot, a crime punishable by life imprisonment. When the miners were released after the judges deemed "unreliable" the evidence provided by the police, many asked the government to open an enquiry on the police's behaviour during the episode, a request still unheeded after nearly forty years.

The Orgreave cokery closed in 1990, and a redevelopment plan, still partly in the making, was proposed for the area. In a region dotted by post-industrial ruins, the plan is marked by its intention to erase every trace of past events, even to the point of changing the name of the location. The attempt to cancel one of the most traumatic events in the collective memory of the mining communities, that saw it as the tangible proof of the hate of Margaret Thatcher for organised labour, has though met fierce opposition, transforming the area in a space of contention. Decades after the strike, the past events still haunt the old cokery site, symbolising the unhealed scar represented by the strike.