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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in Manfredonia, this paper frames the former petrochemical plant as a "ruin without ruins," where destruction persists through silence, regulation, contamination. It shows how past, present, and future collide as repair, memory, and forgetting shape a landscape of disappearance.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the former Enichem petrochemical plant in Manfredonia (Southern Italy) as a case of “ruin without ruins”: a site where industrial destruction survives not through visible remains, but through silence, regulation, and contamination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores how ruination unfolds through polarised and entangled temporalities. Once Italy’s fourth-largest petrochemical hub, Enichem closed in the 1990s after decades of pollution, accidents, and social conflict. Today, almost nothing of the factory remains recognisable on the surface, while contamination persists underground. What inhabitants experience is an anti-ruin: a landscape that does not invite imagination or nostalgia. The specificity of the petrochemical site becomes visible by contrast with the nearby basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. While there, absence is made visible through aesthetic and monumental practices, at the former factory the opposite occurs: it does not become heritage, but a technical problem to be managed. The past is not displayed, but neutralised, turning industrial presence into a silent absence that still weighs on everyday life. I argue that Manfredonia embodies an entangled ruin shaped by competing temporal regimes. Tentative reindustrialisation projects and endless remediation extend a future-oriented temporality of technical repair, while activists, former workers, and residents inhabit fractured pasts marked by selective memory and structural forgetting. In this sense, the Manfredonia case shows how ruination does not necessarily appear as spectacular decay, but can operate through erasure: not as what is seen, but as what continues to shape life precisely through its disappearance.