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.