I am in Geneva, in a house I share with other people. It is dinnertime. We eat in silence, or almost. At a certain point, one of them reaches for a bottle of ketchup and lets a thin stream fall onto a takeaway pizza. In that instant, something flickers across her face – a bodily hesitation that arrives before thought. She stops, looks at me and apologises. She murmurs something – ketchup, pizza, Italy. I am Italian, and that seems explanation enough: as though the country of my birth had appointed me its culinary sentry, as though tradition had trained me to spot the transgression. But that is not the case. I feel no offence. Ketchup on pizza does not trouble me. Sometimes, with a pleasure I hardly admit even to myself, I add mayonnaise. It is a gesture that scandalises; for that very reason, I don’t seek to defend it.

In recent years, in Italy and beyond, a form of attention has taken hold that increasingly resembles a discipline. A return to origins; a recovery of recipes and of “authentic” ingredients. On the most ambitious menus, pizza is no longer simply itself but a catalogue of its provenances: fiordilatte from Agerola, pomodorini del piennolo. Names that carry a promise of purity, as though the distance an ingredient has travelled could measure its truth. Choosing local produce is an ecologically responsible decision—but what do we really mean by “local”? In Milan, my city, indisputably Italian, is something that comes from Naples more local than something that arrives from Geneva? And what happens when the idea of proximity overlooks the conditions under which that food was harvested, the exploited lives that make its appearance on our tables possible? In southern Italy, the tomato bears stories of exploitation and organised crime, yet these realities seem to slide away, unable to fracture the symbolic value of tradition.

Tradition exerts a particular force: it turns habit into destiny, the past into a measure of the good. It persuades us that what is ancient must also be right, that what has endured need not be questioned. Yet if we look more closely at pizza, the myth begins to crack. American soldiers moving through Italy during the liberation from Fascism remarked on their surprise at not encountering pizzerias along the way. It is a telling detail: until the 1950s, pizza was an almost exclusively Neapolitan food, eaten standing up, in the street, with uncertain, often improvised, ingredients. It bore little resemblance to today’s obsession, with its disciplinary codes and chequered tablecloths that now seem to certify its origins. It was Italian emigrants in the United States who gave pizza a stable form. Far from home, suspended between nostalgia and economic opportunity, they transformed a mobile, impoverished food into an institution. This is something that sometimes happens in migrant communities: what was once ordinary becomes a symbol, even a form of resistance; what was fluid begins to stiffen. From there, pizza returned to Italy after the war, bearing a new identity, more defined, more exacting, more rigid.

The illusion of its antiquity is further reinforced by a carefully constructed story. We are told that the Margherita was invented in 1889, on the occasion of Queen Margherita of Savoy’s visit to Naples, and that its colours echoed the Italian tricolour. Today we know this story to be false, yet its effectiveness has not diminished in the slightest. It works because it answers a need. It does not matter that pizza is not truly ancient; what matters is that we needed to believe it was. Can we then say that, because it is recent and dynamic, pizza does not belong to Italian tradition? I don’t think so. But this compels us to acknowledge something essential: the strength of a tradition does not lie in its historical authenticity. Traditions do not establish themselves because they are “true”, but because they are useful. They draw on history, on stories, as a source of legitimation, a way of making what is contingent appear necessary.

I am an art historian, and history has always fascinated me, not as a repository of facts (which it is not), but as a field of narratives. I grew up in a country that has built a substantial part of its identity on preserving the past, especially its material past, often without questioning too closely what was being preserved, or why. Yet history is never neutral or objective: it is a layering of stories that guide our gestures and, over time, shape the reality we inhabit. The past does not exist in and of itself; it is continually reconstructed from the standpoint of the present. We make it. In 1889, no one needed a tricolour pizza. But that story suddenly became useful in a country that, after war, was searching for shared symbols.

The flag, after all, is a perfect example of a recently invented tradition, born alongside the emergence of nation states and their need to appear recognisable and cohesive. Its strength lies precisely in presenting as natural and immutable what is, in fact, the product of a specific historical conjuncture. Within the flag is condensed a constant tension between the idea of community and that of boundary, between the desire to belong and the gesture that determines who is excluded. It is from this awareness that, in the project Se rencontrer sur le seuil, with the artist Davide-Christelle Sanvee and the community of the Champs-Fréchets neighbourhood in Geneva, we are working on the creation of a neighbourhood flag. The aim is not to represent an identity as something fixed and self-contained, but to give form to a process, one that emerges from a shared way of inhabiting a place.

In my own experience, the colours of the national flag were once confined to particular occasions: sporting events, official ceremonies. Then they began to surface elsewhere, first on food packaging, then across a multitude of products, as a mark of excellence, a guarantee of quality. Food, and its presumed tradition, has become one of the preferred vehicles of an increasingly pervasive nationalist rhetoric.

The recent recognition of Italian cuisine as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage seems to follow this trajectory. More than safeguarding living practices, it constructs a reassuring image, ready for consumption, from tourism to global markets, while whether those practices are genuinely alive in everyday life is far from certain. As Eric Hobsbawm observes in The Invention of Tradition, where old ways remain vital, there is no need to recover or reinvent them. And indeed, in Italy today, contrary to the stereotype, ready-made food is consumed as widely as elsewhere in Europe. The material conditions of life have shifted: working hours, family structures, access to food, the distribution of domestic labour. Long, calorie-dense preparations – a ragù simmered for hours – still exist, but as exceptions: comforting images of a timeless Italy that is, precisely for that reason, largely a construction.

It is telling that such images are invoked ever more insistently just as their material basis grows thinner: a symbolic language offering stability at a moment when social, economic and cultural transformations are rapid and often disorientating. As Hobsbawm again notes, it is precisely in such moments that the invention of traditions intensifies: when past models are no longer practicable, yet remain available as an identity reserve. Tradition is mobilised to uphold a worldview grounded in fixity, nostalgia and social roles that no longer correspond to the realities of societies in transition. By evoking a compact and coherent past, complexity can be simplified, and change recast as deviation rather than as a structural and generative condition.

As a researcher, I work, among other things, on ecological practices rooted in local communities and deeply embedded in particular territories. I often encounter techniques and forms of knowledge described, somewhat automatically, as “traditional”. Yet in most cases, the people who sustain these practices do not regard tradition as fixed or untouchable. On the contrary, what emerges from fieldwork is a far more supple understanding: tradition as a body of customs that combines symbolic value with technical and pragmatic care – practices devised to meet concrete needs, and therefore ready to be modified, adapted or abandoned when conditions change. Life, quite simply, demands it.

While preparing the project d’un champ à l’autre / von Feld zu Feld, we came across a series of old agricultural tools, among them a wooden “comb” used to harvest blueberries. We were drawn to it, almost moved, precisely because it was “traditional”. Yet an analysis carried out with a local biologist revealed that the tool damages the plant, compromising its capacity to regenerate. Knowledge evolves. Responsibilities evolve with it. To pretend otherwise is to turn tradition into an alibi.

This does not mean that traditions lack value. On the contrary, one of their most profound effects lies in their ability to hold communities together. It is not necessarily the efficiency of a practice that forges durable bonds, but the repetition of gestures, the sharing of symbols, an irrational dimension that generates belonging. This is something we sought to activate, for instance, in our project Vivre le Rhône, which aimed to foster a community of river guardians. It is undeniable, however, that mechanisms of this kind can harden, shifting from spaces of relation into instruments of exclusion. Tradition can become a Trojan horse for ideology.

Deciding what to preserve, what to transform and what to relinquish is a complex process. It cannot be resolved by appealing to a mythologised past, nor, conversely, by invoking efficiency alone. It requires a situated gaze, one capable of distinguishing what is alive and why, from what is merely staged, as so often happens within the tourist circuit. The Alps, for instance, have gradually been reshaped into a narrative landscape – reassuring, aestheticised – in which objects and practices are lifted out of everyday life and recomposed as scenery for the outsider’s gaze. This is what has been described as “proximity exoticism”, a notion I explored in one of our newsletters: an idea of tradition that serves not those who inhabit a place, but those who consume it. Tradition is transformed from process into image, stripped of contradiction and change in order to remain recognisable.

Drawing: Anaëlle Clot

As an art historian, I am interested in the moment when preservation ceases to appear as a technical gesture and reveals itself for what it is: a choice about the past, the present and the future. To decide what to conserve and what not to conserve is to establish a hierarchy among things—among traces and fragments deemed worthy of crossing time. Almost invariably, this hierarchy is mirrored in lives as well: in which experiences are made visible, which memories are safeguarded, which losses are rendered acceptable. Preservation is never merely conservation; it is a way of organising continuity, of distributing attention, care and resources. For that reason, discourse on tradition is never innocent. It speaks, above all, about the kind of future we permit ourselves to imagine.

In an era marked by climate crisis, this question becomes more urgent still, because preservation no longer concerns only objects and monuments, but the very conditions that make life possible. And yet it is precisely here that a fracture appears: between the obsessive, almost liturgical care we devote to what we call heritage and our readiness to tolerate the slow erosion of ecosystems, the normalisation of the irreversible. It is as though we had developed a sentimental education in loss that functions perfectly when loss has a name, a frame, a certified value, but falters when what disappears is diffuse, not easily representable, or too vast to be contained within an image.

A few years ago, I was struck by the public reaction to the actions of Last Generation and similar groups – acts of civil disobedience by environmental activists intended to produce a symbolic shock through interventions on works of art. The immediate wave of indignation, the shared sense of profanation that arises the moment an artwork is touched, was revealing. I was invited to speak about these questions at the conference Museums at the Ecological Turn, and it became clear to me how deeply the issue concerned the hierarchy of griefs and fears that a society renders available, and which Ultima Generazione, with their question “What matters more, art or life?”, lay bare. They short-circuit our capacity to be scandalised and our capacity to act.

Until not long ago, ecosystems were imagined as a stable, almost eternal backdrop, capable of absorbing the consequences of human transformation. It was within this understanding of the future that the industrial choices of the twentieth century were made. The establishment of the Ilva steel plant in Taranto, in southern Italy, is emblematic. Centuries-old olive groves were uprooted to make way for a modernity promised as redemption – of labour, of wages, of escape from poverty – at a historical moment when environmental damage had not yet been perceived as an irreversible threshold. The future seemed expansive enough to compensate for everything.

Taranto, to which we are dedicating a research-creation project at least, has been classified by the United Nations as a “sacrifice zone”: a severely contaminated territory in which vulnerable communities disproportionately bear the environmental and social costs of a development model whose benefits are enjoyed elsewhere. This harsh geography of inequality is inscribed in the city’s very layout. Its historic centre has been progressively allowed to decay, as life shifted towards new neighbourhoods built in proximity to the Ilva plant. Today, the territories we inhabit are increasingly scattered with more recent ruins: disused industrial infrastructures, abandoned office blocks, suspended spaces – fragments of a time that failed to become history. In a text published in least’s latest newsletter, I sought to reflect on these remains of a world unfinished rather than concluded: ruins too close to us to be read at a distance, keeping open a question about time, about how much future we once imagined, and how little of it now remains to be redistributed.

In the next session of our training programme Cultural Practices in Transition, the anthropologist Giulia Angrisani will lead a speculative storytelling workshop at Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. For two days, in keeping with the museum’s new guidelines, we will suspend its function as a place of conservation and treat it instead as a space for generating new thought worlds. As we prepare the workshop together, I will introduce one exercise in advance: standing before a painting and imagining what happened before, and what might happen after. It is a minimal gesture, yet it produces a shift. It disrupts fixity, restores time to the object, and reinserts it into a continuity that belongs not only to the past but also to the realm of the possible. I believe this exercise can be extended to anything – a building, a landscape, a territory, a practice – because it compels us to take a position: would I have wished to preserve it, to transform it, to let it go? And above all: who decides, and in the name of which future?

I have been writing this newsletter for four years, and this is the first time I have chosen to speak in the first person. The reflections gathered here arise from a genuine difficulty I encounter in my work as a researcher at least. I accompany artistic projects involving local communities and transdisciplinary teams, and in these contexts, I am never an external observer. I take part in the processes as an individual, with a history, emotions and doubts. The way we relate to the past, and the ways in which the past is mobilised, is one of the questions that returns to me most insistently. Too often the past is understood either as an objective, unquestionable narrative or, conversely, as something freely malleable. Yet producing art or culture entails responsibility. The images, narratives and references we choose do not remain neutral: they produce effects, orient our gaze, and render certain futures more imaginable than others. We see this clearly in the resurgence of nationalisms and violences that permeate the world we inhabit.

With this text, I did not wish to offer answers I do not possess – nor particularly want to possess – but rather to convey the complexity of standing before questions that resist closure, contradictions that ought not to be resolved. To share them, to acknowledge them as such, to work through them, as we do at least, is already a way of making and circulating more conscious choices, artistically, socially and politically.

One of the most precious aspects of research within collective artistic processes lies precisely here: in the absence of any obligation to arrive at conclusions, and instead in the capacity to remain with questions, with ambivalences, and to discover within them a meaning that is never purely individual. Conducting research at least means inhabiting this space: being situated; holding together everyday experience, study and practice; relating the local and the global without separating what happens nearby from what unfolds elsewhere; remaining stubbornly within the process, even when it generates frustration.

Like this one: I tried several times to close this text by returning to the question of pizza. But sometimes the past, if it is not to collapse into crude rhetoric, must simply be allowed to fall away.

–Stella Succi, researcher at least

Over recent decades, ruins have come to occupy a central place in the Western imagination. From post-apocalyptic cinema and video games to disaster tourism, destroyed cities, abandoned houses, and disused infrastructures increasingly serve as backdrops for contemporary narratives. This omnipresence does not merely point to an aesthetic fascination with decay; rather, it signals a deeper shift in how we relate to time, history, and the built environment.

In this context, the phenomenon of urbex (urban exploration) is particularly revealing. Urbex is not about contemplating ruins from a distance, but about entering and moving through them: former factories, hospitals, schools, theatres, hotels. These are, more often than not, ordinary, everyday buildings—places we can still easily imagine inhabiting. It is precisely this familiarity that generates a distinctive unease. What unsettles us is not the remoteness of a long-lost past, but a more disquieting form of separation, as though these sites existed in a parallel time: too close to us to feel fully historical. Contemporary ruins do not appear as the remains of a world that has definitively ended, but as suspended fragments of a world that seems unable to transform itself.

Diane Scott, in her essay Ruine, demonstrates with particular acuity that the proliferation of ruins must be understood within a cultural regime in which the object and its representation no longer merely coexist, but become inseparable. Today, it is impossible to “see” Detroit—an emblematic city of deindustrialisation and contemporary ruin—without also seeing it through the lens already imposed by cinema and photography. These media have shaped it in advance, producing a hyper-photogenic, polished, and aesthetically seductive image of ruin, conspicuously emptied of its inhabitants. Yet this emptiness is far from neutral. It operates as a veil: behind the postcard ruin lie state abandonment, poverty, violence, segregation, political trauma, and the people who continue to live in the city under conditions of extreme precarity. Ruin here is not simply a theme; it functions as a dispositif, capable of converting a historical problem into a surface for contemplation, draining it of its conflictual force.

From this perspective, the vogue for vintage aesthetics and the logic of cinematic reboots—both hallmarks of recent decades—follow strikingly similar dynamics. Objects, styles, and ideas from the past are retrieved only on the condition that they be detached from their histories. The fragment survives only insofar as it is softened, defanged, and transformed into mood or atmosphere. The resulting nostalgia is often shot through with cynicism: a fondness for the past that keeps it safely at arm’s length, treating it as little more than an aesthetic catalogue stripped of antagonism. The reboot operates in much the same way. Rather than reactivating history, it freezes it, re-presenting it as an endless present devoid of risk or rupture. Once again, time does not advance—it accumulates.

Drawing: Anaëlle Clot

This state of temporal suspension had already been anticipated by Robert Smithson at the end of the 1960s, when he coined the notion of “ruins in reverse” in his celebrated essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Modern constructions, he argued, do not fall into ruin after having fulfilled their purpose; they emerge as ruins even before completing their life cycle. Unlike the Romantic ruin, which gestures towards a distant past and confers a sense of historical depth, modern ruins appear within the lifetime of those who witnessed their construction. The material residues produced by accelerated cycles of building no longer promise endurance but instead signal planned obsolescence—the pre-consumption of the future.

This acceleration has turned contemporary ruins into generational experiences. Buildings vanish, are decommissioned, or rendered unusable within the span of a few decades. The catastrophe that gives rise to them—economic collapse, industrial shutdown, environmental disaster—is often precisely datable. The time of the ruin itself, however, is not. It drifts in an undated “after”: an interregnum that seems to belong less to an aftermath than to an after-history. This is a time that no longer enables us to measure the past, nor to project ourselves clearly into a future.

This is why, in contemporary reflections on ruins, the gaze increasingly turns forward rather than back. Ruins become screens onto which a future of ecological devastation is projected—still amorphous, yet already intuitively graspable within the Capitalocene—where industrial remnants make visible a toxic and enduring human imprint. No longer sites of melancholic reflection on the passage of time, nor monumental relics of lost values and vanished splendours, ruins now present themselves as hostile environments that return to the societies that produced them the violence of short-term economic thinking.

This framework now extends to territories that have been less intensively anthropized, such as the Alps. The mountains are increasingly dotted with very recent ruins: abandoned ski lifts, rusting pylons, deserted hotels. These structures speak with particular clarity of futures imagined and consumed too quickly. Their abandonment results from an entanglement of economic and ecological forces: the disappearance of reliable snowfall, rising temperatures, and the broader climate crisis have rendered untenable a tourism model built around snow. Infrastructures that are still technically operational are thus abruptly reduced to uselessness—ruins generated by a mismatch between human projects and ecological conditions. Alpine ruins therefore stand as some of the most visible expressions of a present that confronts its own remains yet struggles to turn them into history.

Yet even within landscapes marked by loss and failure, ruins are not solely sites of endings. Increasingly, they become new habitats for what exceeds and outlives the human, turning into refuges for animals and improvised ecological corridors, and opening up unexpected, hybrid spaces of life. Ruins emerge as sites of asymmetric coexistence: humans withdraw, leaving traces behind, while the more-than-human—plant, animal, microbial—reoccupies, transforms, and repurposes what remains. In this sense, ruins offer a way of rethinking relations between human projects and the living world; and if the present struggles to make history of its own debris, ruins remind us that no space is ever truly empty.

“As walking, talking, and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go.” This simple yet incisive observation opens Lines: A Brief History, an essay in which anthropologist Tim Ingold lays the groundwork for what he calls a “comparative anthropology of the line.” The book sets out to trace the presence and purpose of lines across a vast range of human activities, revealing how—through varied historical, cultural and geographical lenses—they disclose the ways in which human beings have imagined, enacted and reshaped their modes of life and thought over time.

Ingold’s reflection is grounded in an anthropological approach that places lived practice at its heart. True to this spirit, he invites readers to undertake a small experiment: to imagine — or better still, to draw — a long, meandering line across a sheet of paper, without any specific aim, a line he likens to being “out for a walk.” He then proposes to reproduce this same line not through the fluid continuity of gesture, but by translating it into a series of evenly spaced dots, that are then joined together. The resulting image may appear much the same, yet the embodied experience of producing it could hardly be more different. One is a gesture surrendered to the fluidity of movement; the other, a deliberate act of juxtaposition and connection, demanding a distinct temporality, attention and corporeality. It is in this lived difference—prior even to any formal one—that Ingold’s contrast between wayfaring and transport comes most sharply into view.

These two ways of drawing a line correspond to two ways of moving through the world and of experiencing space: on the one hand, the itinerant journey, or wayfaring; on the other, the directed motion of transport. In the first, the traveller is not compelled by the need to reach a predetermined destination, for the path itself — potentially infinite — holds the very meaning of movement. This is not to suggest aimless wandering. As hunter-gatherer groups demonstrate, one may travel with attentiveness rather than intent: guided by landmarks, attuned to the fruits to be gathered, the traces leading to new resources, the unexpected opportunities along the way, and even the pauses for rest that form an integral part of the journey. In this view, paths are not mere lines connecting two points; they are gradually shaped, becoming corridors of inscription—lived spaces continually rewritten by those who traverse them.

Transport, by contrast, is defined from the outset by a fixed destination and by the aim of moving people or goods “in such a way as to leave their basic natures unaffected.” What matters here is not the lived experience of the journey, nor any attentiveness to what unfolds along the way, but rather the efficiency of transfer from one place to another — so that any personal transformation that travel might provoke is systematically excluded. Intermediate stages, in this logic, are not moments of pause, observation or reinterpretation, but mere functional intervals, measured in terms of technical activity or completion. Where the wayfarer is always somewhere — rooted in a relationship of presence with the environment they inhabit — the passenger in transport, when neither at the point of departure nor at the point of arrival, is nowhere: suspended in transit, stripped of situated experience. Ingold aptly summarises this condition, calling it “the dissolution of the intimate bond that, in wayfaring, couples locomotion and perception.”

This distinction also finds expression in spatial metaphors. The wayfarer, moving along, weaves an irregular mesh that overlaps and intertwines with other lines, forming a fabric that embodies a way of dwelling in the world. Transport, by contrast, conjures a network of interconnected points, in which paths are reduced to functional segments linking predetermined nodes — reflecting less an experience of dwelling than a logic of occupation. These two perspectives are not simply variations on a theme; they reveal profoundly different conceptions of the relationship between movement and space.

Drawing: Anaëlle Clot.

Likewise, representations of space bear the imprint of this distinction. When we sketch a map to give someone directions, what appears on paper is never a mere objective transposition, but the outcome of lived experience — enriched by our stories, memories and the gestures that accompany our explanations. Each mark bears witness to a journey already taken, traced along a “path of observation.” In this sense, lines are not simple graphic signs but traces of movement—the very essence of the sketch, for they both orient and evoke a tangible relationship with the terrain. By contrast, on a modern map, the line loses its narrative and experiential charge, assuming instead a symbolic and normative role: it signifies roads, railways and physical or administrative boundaries, embodying “an appropriation of the space surrounding the points that the lines connect or (…) that they enclose.” The result is a form of cartographic knowledge that does not emerge from the embodied experience of movement, but is constructed by linking distant, abstract points—fragmenting experience and silencing the stories it might tell. It is not knowledge that moves, but knowledge assembled: functional to a system of occupation and control rather than to a process of dwelling and observation. This way of representing space also permeates urban design, structured by limits, predefined routes and thresholds — features that the everyday practices of inhabitants continually subvert or reinterpret.

At this juncture, Ingold makes a decisive turn in his argument. Beneath the different ways of moving through and representing space, he discerns two distinct ways of conceiving knowledge. He shows that our understanding of knowing is inseparable from the gestures and trajectories through which we relate to the world: every form of knowledge, whether explicit or implicit, is grounded in a way of moving, walking or orienting oneself. In contemporary Western societies, the conception of movement as linear, goal-oriented and efficient has gradually shaped a corresponding form of knowledge — one constructed through the linking of fixed points, through processes of organisation, classification and articulation. This is knowledge built by juxtaposition, privileging stability and measurement over the fluidity and contingency of lived experience. To know, in this view, is to accumulate data and to establish abstract relations among discrete elements — a logic of control and planning.

Conversely, conceiving movement as a continuous and open journey invites us to reimagine knowledge as a living process, formed in direct contact with the world, within the temporality of gesture and the reciprocity of perception. Knowing no longer means dominating or representing from without but dwelling within an environment: allowing oneself to be moved by its rhythms and to respond to its invitations. In this light, knowledge emerges as a practice of attention and participation—a dynamic entanglement of perception, memory and invention. It becomes a path of thought which, like the wayfarer’s journey, does not seek a final destination but continually renews itself through its very unfolding.

In this sense, representations of space are not neutral images of the world, but genuine cognitive and relational models: they both mirror and shape particular ways of thinking and living. Contemporary maps and diagrams, by reducing space to a network of functional connections, express a form of knowledge that separates the observer from the world, imposing an external and overarching point of view. Yet the experience of dwelling — woven from everyday gestures, diversions and encounters — reveals an opposing logic: not one of distance, but of proximity; not one of occupation, but of involvement.

The notion of a “pure transport” — a movement linking two points without leaving any trace of transformation — is, for Ingold, an illusion, much like the belief in neutral, disembodied knowledge. One cannot know without being involved, just as one cannot traverse a space without altering it or being altered in return. For Ingold, to know is always to inhabit the world: to engage with it through practice, attention and gesture, weaving with the living a fabric of correspondences and shared stories. It is within this reciprocity, rather than within abstraction, that what he calls the “ecology of life” takes shape: a form of knowledge that does not merely connect points, but follows the very lines of the living, opening itself to the continuity and unpredictability of the inhabited world.

This text was written by the artist Martin Reinartz as part of least’s research residency program in Southern Europe. This program aims to create dialogue between artists, researchers, and communities around ecological and social issues, through periods of immersion in territories strongly affected by the consequences of the environmental crisis. Martin Reinartz’s residency in Taranto, made possible thanks to our ongoing collaboration with the local collective Post Disaster, is part of this approach.

November 2024.

I’m going to Taranto as a guest artist with the Post Disaster collective of architects and urban planners. I know nothing about the city other than the stories I’ve heard about it. I don’t want to know anything more, I don’t want to pre-empt anything.

People might think that it’s unjustifiable, someone coming without a plan. I reassure myself. My plan is this total absence of a plan. I simply want to ask them, those who will welcome me, that we walk together in their city. Just two at a time. That they take me to places that are important to them, that they love. No matter whether it’s the laundromat or a friend’s house for a drink.

For me, walking is a way of getting to know a city. There’s nothing apparently productive in that act. Nothing that distinguishes me from the rest of the world, nothing that says: “this person is an artist”. No particular technique to show off, no great skill.

I try to slip into everyday life. To slip into the city and let myself be carried along by its ebb and flow. I’m not trying to produce an object. Just to be there, to experience the place and what it has to offer.

Does that mean it’s all pretence?

Can one just come along without justification? At what point does the size of a project incorporate the idea of profitability? How does this profitability influence collaborative relationships, between associate artists, between artists and organisations? I try to spot these signals. I try to be cunning. Like someone trying to get off a well-trodden road.

Peppe Frisino

“Are we meeting tomorrow in the morning? I’ll be in the old town at 8.30am and I could take you with me to some meetings. We can meet at Falanto, the bar on Via Duomo! They’re my friends, but they’re not always nice…”

Peppe Frisino is an urban planner. He’s the only member of the collective still living in the city. He lives with his family in the old town of Taranto.

It’s nine o’clock and he’s taking me to a friend’s house, a man with a shaved head in a tracksuit. Peppe introduces me as his partner. I’ve only known him for five minutes.

We go upstairs to a flat with white tiles on the floor and walls. The sofa is white, the table is light wood. Apart from that, there’s nothing in this living room.

The man explains to Peppe that he has to help him assemble a wooden frame. A huge frame measuring one metre by sixty centimetres, to which will be stapled a photo of his son, taken on the day of his communion.

Peppe, I’ll understand later, has a special role in this neighbourhood.

The old town of Taranto is built on a small island. It’s known as the historic centre because, despite its current appearance, it was and remains one of the city’s most important centres.

Everyone in the neighbourhood knows Peppe. This is his playground. He tells me that he spends 90% of his time there, while others never set foot there. Too dirty. Too run-down. Too dangerous.

Peppe walks fast. He has a cargo bike to pick up his children from school, off the island. Like you shouldn’t get away for too long.

As he crosses Via Duomo, in the heart of the island, Peppe takes his time. People stop him, he asks for news, cracks jokes, introduces me, they smile at me and speak to me in Italian.

I wonder what exactly he does for a living. What defines him. It’s impossible to understand what it means to him to be an urban planner, but I have a feeling that his approach is deeply linked to the way he relates to this place. To every person who fills the streets.

“Wednesday. Peppe is something of a trickster. Elusive, he crosses the old town of Taranto with disconcerting ease. He’s an urban planner, of course, but that title isn’t enough. He’s a neighbour, an accomplice. I’ve just arrived, and he introduces me as one of his own, blurring identities and roles. He navigates between residents, slipping from one conversation to the next, going here and there. For him, relationships take precedence over his function. Like a trickster, he doesn’t conform to expectations. He plays, improvises, twists and turns. By helping a man assemble a frame for a communion photo or chatting on the side of Via Duomo, he shapes the place without claiming it. He’s one of those figures who exist not so much by what they do as by the way they inhabit the world.”

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

Gabriella Mastrangelo

Gabriella lives in Massafra, on the outskirts of Taranto. I will join her by bus on Friday morning so she can take me to places she hasn’t told me about. I don’t seek to know. My proposal to undertake personal walks is thus taking shape. I find it reassuring.

Gabriele Leo

Gabriele came to pick me up in the historic center, by car. He explains that he arrived early that morning from Venice, where he is developing a doctoral thesis. His thesis topic: the emergence of imaginaries stemming from environmental catastrophe. His involvement in the Post Disaster collective is at the heart of his reflection.

“Post Disaster is the name of the association. It comes from Timothy Morton, an American theorist of Dark Ecology. He develops the idea that in dominant discourses, there’s much talk about the impending catastrophe, whereas in places like Taranto, the catastrophe is already here. We live in the forthcoming catastrophe, in the Post Disaster.”

Gabriele wants to take me to Mottola, a town on the outskirts of Taranto where he partially grew up. He says he’s not attached to Taranto, not like Peppe. He says he has a more complex relationship with this city, one of attraction-repulsion. “I didn’t choose to live here. I’ve rarely chosen my places of residence. Today, in Venice, I feel good.”

In Mottola, we climb one of the main streets, deserted, and arrive at a viewpoint offering one of the highest views in the region. In front of us, a few dozen kilometers away, Ilva and other factories.

Today, the pollution cloud above the factories isn’t very discernible. It varies greatly, depending on weather conditions.

People don’t come here. They don’t look at Taranto. They look at Bari. They look at Lecce. Taranto, they turn their backs on it.

“There are cities that become the reflection of a country, of its transformations, of its unresolved knots, of its failures, of its falls, but also of its aspirations for redemption. Taranto is one of those cities: a unique urban laboratory, caught between the chimneys of Ilva and the sea stretching out before its palaces, emblematic of 20th-century industrial development and its drift into a deep crisis.

Taranto is a city of layers. A city where historical, temporal, and sociological plans intertwine, often obscuring each other. Its past as the capital of Magna Graecia, a Mediterranean port traversed by cultural intermingling and foreign dominations, is just one of those layers. It’s a layer increasingly difficult to grasp, engulfed in the meanders of History and often brought to the surface in the form of dreams or hidden impulses. But the city we know today, stretching like a grayish concrete tongue over several kilometers at the top of the gulf bearing its name, is fundamentally a creation of the 20th century, marked by large industry and the development policies that shaped it.

Towards the end of the 19th century, just after Italian unification, Taranto had just over thirty thousand inhabitants, residing mainly on the ancient island constituting the old city. The construction of the military Arsenal marked the beginning of chaotic economic and urban development that would characterize Taranto throughout the 20th century. On the ruins of this military-industrial complex, the steelmaking dream was then built, the new state industry that made Taranto the most working-class city in the Mezzogiorno. But it was only much later that the extent of the damage left by this Promethean forge implanted on the shores of the Ionian Sea could be measured.” (Alessandro Leogrande, Fumo sulla città, Fandango Libri, 2013)

In this brief poetic composition, Emily Dickinson celebrates the happiness of a simple, independent life, represented by a small stone wandering freely. Far from human worries and ambitions, the stone finds contentment in its elemental existence. Written in the 19th century, the poem reflects the growing disillusionment with industrialisation and urbanisation, which led many to aspire to a more modest and meaningful life.

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity

Image: Altalena.

In everyday language, the term “landscape” encompasses a variety of notions: it can refer to an ecosystem, a beautiful view, or even an economic resource. However, the complexity of the term can be better understood and approached through the concept of “experience”.

Experience is something that brings us into contact with the outside, with otherness: in this context, the landscape is no longer seen as an object, but rather as a relationship between human society and the environment. An experience is also something that touches us emotionally, that moves and transforms us. Viewing a “landscape” as such helps us realise how much it gives meaning to our individual and collective lives, to the extent that its transformation or disappearance leads to the destruction of sensitive markers of existence in the lives of its inhabitants. Experience can also be seen as a form of practical knowledge or wisdom. It is the kind of knowledge that is acquired by living in a place, which makes the people who inhabit a landscape its experts. Finally, experience is also a form of experimentation: this is the active aspect of our relationship with the world, enabling us to discover and create new knowledge and to bring to life what is yet only potential.

We might take these reflections a step further and argue that human beings live off the landscape—a statement that may seem hyperbolic, but that makes sense if we pay close attention. Indeed, the landscape is the source of our food: we live in the landscape and the latter activates representations and emotions within us. Our relationship with the landscape is dynamic: by changing it, we also change ourselves. It is therefore impossible to avoid entering into a relationship with the landscape. The very choice of ignoring and not ‘experiencing’ a landscape can have practical and symbolic consequences.

It is on the basis of these observations that Jean-Marc Besse wrote La Nécessité du Paysage (the Necessity of the Landscape): an essay on ecology, architecture, and anthropology, as well as an invitation to question our modes of action. In it, the French philosopher warns us against any action on the landscape: an attitude that places us ‘outside’ the said landscape, which, as mentioned above, is simply not plausible. Acting on a landscape means fabricating it, in other words starting from a preconceived idea that ignores the fact that the landscape is a living system and not an inert object. “Acting on therefore involves a twofold dualism, separating subject and object on the one hand, and form and matter on the other.”

So how might we escape this productive yet falsifying paradigm? Besse suggests a change of perspective: moving from acting on to acting with, recognising “that matter is animated to a certain extent” and envisaging it “as a space of potential propositions and possible trajectories”. The aim, in this case, is to interact “adaptively and dynamically”, to practise transformation rather than production. Acting with means engaging in ongoing negotiation, remaining open to the indeterminacy of the process, and being in dialogue with the landscape: in a word, collaborating with it.

Georg Wilson, All Night Awake, 2023

Acting with the soil
The “abiotic” dimension of soil is addressed, among other disciplines, by topography, paedology, geology, and hydrography. However, from a philosophical point of view, soil is simply the material support on which we live. This is where we construct the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on, and it is the soil that makes agriculture possible, one of the oldest and most complex fundamental manifestations of human activity. This “banal” soil is therefore in reality the focus of a whole series of essential political, social, and economic issues, and as such it raises fundamental questions. What kind of soil, water, or air do we want? The environmental disasters linked to the climate crisis and soil erosion or the consequences of the loss of fertility of agricultural and forest land call for collective responses that draw on both scientific knowledge and technical skills, as well as many political and ethical aspects.

Acting with the living
The landscapes we inhabit, travel through, and transform (including the soil and subsoil) are in turn inhabited, travelled through, and transformed by other living beings, animals and plants. In his essay Sur la Piste Animale (On the Animal Trail), philosopher Baptiste Morizot invites us to live together “in the great ‘shared geopolitics’ of the landscape”, by trying to take the point of view of “wild animals, trees that communicate, living soil that works, plants that are allies in the permacultural kitchen garden, to see through our eyes and become sensitive to their habits and customs, to their immutable perspectives on the cosmos, to invent thousands of relationships with them”. To interpret a landscape correctly, it is necessary to take into account the “active power of living beings” with their spatiality and temporality, and to integrate our relationship with them.

Acting with other human beings
A landscape is a “collective situation” that also concerns inter-human relations in their various forms. A landscape is linked to desires, representations, norms, practices, stories, and expectations, and it draws on emotions and positions as diverse as people’s desires, experiences, and interests. Acting with other human beings means acting with a complex whole that includes individuals, communities, and institutions, and drawing on the practical and symbolic—in a continuous process of negotiation and mediation.

Acting with space
Considered through the tools of geometry, space is an objective entity: its dimensions, proportions, and boundaries can be satisfactorily described. However, the space of the landscape cannot be reduced to measurable criteria. In reality, it is an intrinsically heterogeneous space: “locations, directions, distances, morphologies, ways of practising them and of investing in them economically and emotionally are not equivalent either spatially or qualitatively”. Interpreting the space of the landscape correctly therefore means remembering that “numerical” and “geometric” measurements are necessarily false, and that the set of geographies (economic, social, cultural, or personal) that make it up are neither neutral, nor uniform, nor fixed in time.

Acting with time
When we think of the relationship between landscape and time, the first image that springs to mind is that of the earth’s crust and the geological layers that make it up, or that of archaeological ruins buried beneath the surface. In short, we imagine a sort of tidy “palimpsest” of a past time, with which all relations are closed. The time of the landscape, however, should be interpreted according to more complex logics: we need only think of the persistence of practices and experiences in its context, and the fact that landscape destruction is never total: rather, it is transformation. What’s more, the time of the landscape also includes non-human time scales, such as geology, climatology, and vegetation. They are temporalities to which we are nonetheless closely linked. Thus, in reality, the landscape remains in constant tension between past and present.

“Our era,” Jean-Marc Besse concludes, “is one of a crisis of attention. […] Landscape seems to be one of the ‘places’ where the prospect of a ‘correspondence’ with the world can be rediscovered […]. In other words, the landscape […] can be seen as a device for paying attention to reality, and thus as a fundamental condition for activating or reactivating a sensitive and meaningful relationship with the surrounding world”, in other words, the necessity of the landscape.

“One day, at the Ironbound Community Corporation, we smelled something pungent. Wherever you pass over the Ironbound, the main sight will be smokestacles. My whole life, I had smelled this smell. My colleagues said we had to call it in to the Department of Environmental Protection. That was when I started realising that I’ve known that smell my whole life but never thought of it as a problem. That smell made me realise the difference between neighbourhoods like Newark and the suburbs, where there are all these trees and the air actually smells clean. Racial justice has always been a part of my life, but at that moment I realised how insidious environmental racism truly is”. These words were written by Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a Honduran-American activist who has been fighting for years for environmental justice in the Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey. The neighbourhood is infamously known for its “chemical corridor”, a one-mile stretch where “you pass a natural gas plant next to a sewage treatment facility next to an animal fat rendering plant next to a series of ominous looking chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. Airplanes pass overhead every two minutes, their engines rattling windows, while a putrid smell wafts from the open pools at the sewage treatment plant.” The area is inhabited by Portuguese, Brazilian, Central American, African American and low-income white people: their fight to “break the cycle of poor communities of colour serving as dumping grounds for our consumer society” is the subject of 2020’s documentary The Sacrifice Zone: Life in an Industrial Wasteland.

The notion of “sacrifice zone” dates back to the Cold War, when the nuclear arms race between the US and USSR left behind a scourge of territories – many of which inhabited –contaminated by nuclear testing and uranium mining. In recent years, the term “sacrifice zone” has been circulating within environmental activism to the point of being included in a major UN report in 2022 “on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment”. In this document, sacrifice zones are defined as “extremely contaminated areas where vulnerable and marginalised groups bear a disproportionate burden of the health, human rights and environmental consequences of exposure to pollution and hazardous substances”. But why use the very word “sacrifice”? And the burden that communities have to bear is “disproportionate” to whom?

The issue at stake in these zones is not only the contamination of populated territories but the fact that communities living in these areas pay the price for a form of consumerism and lifestyle that they cannot access and that is enjoyed by privileged groups of people who live in other areas, without having to pay the consequences themselves; a price in terms of health and human rights that mirrors the disparities of class in the globalised world. From the unbelievable levels of pollution due to oil and gas flaring in the Niger Delta, to the unregulated landfills that are spread all over the world, to the emissions of the Ilva steel plant in Taranto, the UN report recounts a widespread and desolating phenomenon that underpins our economic system.

This situation does not, as mentioned, only concern the Global South, but also the weaker communities of the Global North which marginalisation, racialisation and media disregard keep at a distance from any form of protection. The most heavily polluting and hazardous facilities, including open-cast mines, smelters, petroleum refineries, chemical plants, coal-fired power stations, oil- and gas fields, steel plants, garbage dumps and hazardous waste incinerators, as well as clusters of these facilities, tend to be located in close proximity to poor and marginalised communities. When an industry with a heavy environmental impact seeks an area for the construction of a plant, on the one hand it will come up against the “not in my backyard” of the wealthier and more influential communities, while on the other hand it is likely to find acceptance in economically disadvantaged areas due to the promise of job creation and development.

A barrier to opposing these exploitative practices is the fact that soil, water and air contamination and their impact are often not immediately visible. As in Lopez-Nuñez’s account, certain conditions are not perceived as dangerous but rather as normal. Sometimes, people only begin to worry after years of exposure to environmental hazards – when industrial pollution-related diseases start to spread – and it is often too late for reparation. In his book Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, Steve Lerner describes the feeling of powerlessness of one of these communities: “Once fenceline residents begin asking questions about the extent of the contamination, they frequently report that they get the run-around from officials and are rarely given straight answers or comprehensive information. They often later learn that both government and corporate personnel withheld the bad news about the extent of the contamination out of concern that it might create a panic. This deceitful, paternalistic behaviour makes it impossible for local residents to make timely and informed choices about whether to move immediately (if they can afford to), stop drinking water from wells, keep the windows closed, send their children to live with relatives in other neighbourhoods, prohibit their children from playing outdoors, avoid gardening or eating home-grown vegetables, or take other protective actions”.

The most dramatic contradiction, indeed, lies in the workers’ dilemma between keeping their jobs and risking their own and their families’ lives, or choosing to demonstrate for their rights, risking the relocation of toxic industries to other, perhaps less regulated areas. But both health and salary are needed to survive: unacceptable blackmail that is being played out on the shoulders of the weakest for the welfare of the most privileged. Nonetheless, de-industrialisation, i.e. the progressive reduction of employed people, is a tangible risk, which has left territories such as the Ruhr region in Germany in the grip of structural economic weakness without having initiated effective clean-ups or redevelopment operations – a fate shared by many heavy-industrial areas since the 1980s.

Eventually, Maria Lopez-Nuñez’s tireless advocacy and the collective efforts of the Ironbound Community Corporation have achieved a significant milestone in the fight against environmental injustice. The S232 Bill, hailed as a robust environmental-justice measure, stands as a beacon of progress in safeguarding communities facing intolerable environmental burdens. However, the struggle is far from over, as the insidious, structural nature of environmental disparities persists globally. As outlined in the UN report, “shareholders in polluting companies benefit from higher profits, while consumers benefit through lower-cost energy and goods. Prolonging the jobs of workers in polluting industries is used as a form of economic blackmail to delay the transition to a sustainable future, while the potential of green jobs is unjustifiably discounted. The continued existence of sacrifice zones is a stain upon the collective conscience of humanity”.

If the end is nigh, why aren’t we managing to take global warming seriously? How can we overcome the apathy of our eternal present? The following article is taken from MEDUSA, an Italian newsletter that talks about climate and cultural changes. Edited by Matteo De Giuli and Nicolò Porcelluzzi in collaboration with NOT, it comes out every second Wednesday and you can register for it here. In 2021, MEDUSA also became a book.

There is no alternative was one of Margaret Thatcher’s slogans: wellbeing, services, economic growth… are goals achievable exclusively by doing things the free market way. 40 years on, in a world built on those very election promises, There is no alternative sounds more like a bleak statement of fact, a maxim curbing our collective imagination: there is no alternative to the system we’re living in. Even when we’re hit by crisis, in times of unrest, exploitation and inequality, the state of affairs finds us more or less defenceless. There’s no escape – or we can’t see it: our room for manoeuvre has been fenced off.

Why can’t we take global warming seriously? Because it’s one of those complex systems that operate, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams affirm in their Inventing the Future, “on temporal and spatial scales that go well beyond the bare perceptual capacities of the individual” and whose effects “are so widespread that it’s impossible to exactly collocate our experience within their context”. In short, the climate problem is also the result of a cognitive problem. We are lost in the corridors of a vast and complex building in which we see no direct and immediate reaction to anything we do and have no clear moral compass to help us find our way.

It was to pursue these issues further that I decided to read What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming (hereafter WWTAWWTNTAGW) by Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes, a book I’d been putting off reading for some time for a series of reasons that turned out to be only partially valid. First of all, there was my vaguely scientist prejudice: despite being interested in the issue, I find that the back cover of WWTAWWTNTAGW sounds more like front flap blurb for some self-help publication rather than for a serious work of popular science. I quote: “Stoknes shows how to retell the story of climate change and at the same time create positive, meaningful actions that can be supported even by negationists”. Then there was the title, WWTAWWTNTAGW, a cumbersome paraphrase of a title that is already, in itself, the most ferociously paraphrased in the history of world literature. And lastly — still on the surface only – there was the spectre of another book by Per Espen Stoknes, published in 2009, the mere cover of which I continue to find insurmountably cringeful: Money & Soul: A New Balance Between Finance and Feelings.

Laying aside, for the moment at least, the prejudices that kept me away from WWTAWWTNTAGW, I discovered a light-handed book that raises various interesting points. In short: why does climate change, our future, interest us so little? Why do we see it as such an abstract and remote problem? What are the cognitive barriers that are sedating, tranquillizing and preventing us from having even the slightest real fear for the fate of the planet? Stoknes identifies five, which can be summed up more or less as follows:

Distance. The climate problem is still remote for many of us, from various points of view. Floods, droughts, bushfires are increasingly frequent but still affect only a small part of the planet. The bigger impacts are still far off in time, a century or more.

Doom. Climate change is spoken of as an unavoidable disaster that will cause losses, costs and sacrifices: it is human instinct to avoid such matters. We are predictably averse to grief. Lack of practical solutions on offer exacerbates feelings of impotence, while messages of catastrophe backfire. We’ve been told that “the end is nigh” so many times that it no longer worries us.

Dissonance. When what we know (using fossil fuel energy contributes to global warming) comes into conflict with what we’re forced to do or what we end up doing anyway (driving, flying, eating beef), we feel cognitive dissonance. To shake this off, we are driven to challenge or underestimate the things we are sure about (facts) in order to be able to go about our daily lives with greater ease.

Denial. When we deny, ignore or avoid acknowledging certain disturbing facts that we know to be “true” about climate change, we are shielding ourselves against the fear and feelings of guilt that they generate, against attacks on our lifestyle. Denial is a self-defence mechanism and is different from ignorance, stupidity or lack of information.

Identity. We filter news through our personal and cultural identities. We look for information that endorses values and presuppositions already inside our minds. Cultural identity overwrites facts. If new information requires us to change ourselves, we probably won’t accept it. We balk at calls to change our personal identities.

There are obviously hundreds of other reasons why we still hold back from a strategy to mitigate climate change: economic interests, the slowness of diplomacy, conflicting development models, the United States, India, sheer egoism, “great derangement” and all the other things we’ve come to know so well over the years. But Per Espen Stoknes empirically suggests a way forward. Catastrophism and alarmism don’t work. We need to find a different tone to dispel the apathy of our eternal present.

Image: The Grosser Aletsch, 1900 Photoglob Wehrli © Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung und Fotoarchiv/ 2021 Fabiano Ventura – © Associazione Macromicro.