Italy and the Environmental Humanities

Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies

Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, Elena Past, Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, Elena Past

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813941080
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria e natura

Bringing together new writing by some of the field's most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia's trafficking, Slow Food's gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures.

At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture.

Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego

1

NATURES AND VOICES

PATRICK BARRON

Gianni Celati’s Voicing of Unpredictable Places

The first book that I read by Gianni Celati was Narratori delle pianure (1985; Voices from the Plains, 1990), a collection of stories informally gathered during wandering journeys along the Po River, so ordinary and unfiltered that they often seem hyperrealistic. When I chanced upon it in a bookstore in Ferrara, a town in northern Emilia-Romagna where I used to live, the cover photograph immediately captured my attention. In it, a man stands somewhat crookedly on a snowy dirt road, facing away from us toward a snowy flat landscape marked by an indistinct edge, likely a bank of the Po River or one of its tributaries. The man in the photograph I later came to realize is Celati, and the photographer his friend and collaborator Luigi Ghirri, renowned for his images of landscapes. As I opened the book, I saw a map of the Po Valley that roughly charts the geographic and narrative flow of the stories Celati recounts, from near Milan east across northern Italy, passing just to the north of Ferrara where I stood, then flowing into the Adriatic Sea about fifty miles south of Venice. I had been searching for works of Italian literature engaged with landscape and ecology, and in Narratori delle pianure found a text that seemed to hold environmental insights at once immediately local and more distant.

The interrelationships between images, maps, and words hinted at in this initial perusal of Narratori delle pianure indeed become increasingly complex as various stories unfold in this and similarly situated work. These narratives—mundane, improbable, random—form a complex spatiotemporal awareness of the Po Valley and recount various oscillating human and nonhuman phenomena in mutable, overlaying localities within an immense enveloping bioregional watershed. This awareness has many phenomenological strands, from the visual to the sonic, calling into question the membranous interface between what and how we perceive and the means by which we express this perception. Celati’s work, ranging from stories and essays to translations and films, is indeed multisensorial, drawing on as it questions field-based observations of sights, sounds, textures, and smells. It is also multidisciplinary, delving into various fields of environmental study, from geology and cultural geography, to fluvial hydrology and urban studies. He affectionately describes everyday places, giving voice to spatial realities that are often overlooked. He not only speaks about and for places but attempts to answer the question of how we might better listen to the voices of places themselves.

By performing an itinerant “reinhabitation” of ordinary places within the Po Valley, Celati consistently makes evident the “separation between conscious human identity and locatedness” and, in so doing, helps to answer Peter Berg’s (2015) question: “How do we rediscover where we actually live?” (62, 61). As Serenella Iovino (2012) argues, “bioregional narratives” such as Celati’s can help “‘restore the imagination’ of place” (100). This is the case even if, as the nomadic Celati claims somewhat slyly in the film Mondonuovo, “I don’t believe in local identity . . . and I don’t believe in belonging to an area, and I don’t believe in so-called roots” (Ferrario and Celati 2003). It is perhaps his intense, peripatetic, and at times paradoxically nearly alien engagement with places to which he was once native, that spurs Celati to develop his complex spatial awareness of the Po Valley—in part by a careful study of what Henri Lefebvre (1991) calls “natural rhythms, and of the modification of those rhythms and their inscription in space by means of human actions,” by an almost constant concern with “the relations between language and space,” and by resisting the temptation to claim as his own images “at once true and false” that the landscape offers (117, 130, 189).

Out of the overarching range of Celati’s interests, I am here most interested in how he voices interconnected marginal places in order to draw attention to the ordinary, often overlooked ecologies in which we all live and move. Or, put another way, how he draws various sensations—in particular sounds, words, and images—directly from the landscape to render as immediately as possible the tangled and transitory interrelations between living beings and their organic and inorganic surroundings, whether agricultural, wild, industrial, urban, or suburban. Celati is especially attentive to interstitial terrains vague, “seemingly abandoned or overgrown sites where the landscape has gone to seed and been left to its own devices,” such as vacant lots, derelict industrial sites, or leftover border areas (Barron 2013, 1). One of the many reasons he is drawn to such caesuras in the landscape is that human-caused disruptions and noises are often muted therein, and other traces and sounds more present. A keen listener, Celati is attuned not only to sonic geographies (distinctive local speech patterns and dialects; Boland 2010), but to greater soundscape ecologies composed of matrices of biological (biophony), geophysical (geophony), and human-produced (anthrophony) sounds (Pijanowsky et al. 2011). Celati’s attention to the larger soundscape enables him, as Iain Foreman (2010) argues in relation to W. G. Sebald’s similarly dérive-based, psychogeographic writing, to hear “the world in simultaneous, interlocking times and spaces where the Other, both temporally and spatially situated, resounds” (9). In his attempt to give voice to the nearly ineffable, Celati gives us a method for re-perceiving the world, for listening to its stories more closely. If we pause to intensely observe wherever we happen to be, distinctions and certainties begin to waver, from where one place ends and another begins, to where what we perceive overlaps with our perceptions, our bodies and selves. Pushed to this edge, language falters as it is also spurred on. As Celati (2011a) puts it, “encounters with places are always unpredictable, attracting us to something we don’t know, to something we don’t know what to call” (8).¹

I focus here on Verso la foce (1989; Towards the River’s Mouth, forthcoming), a contemplative travelogue of “stories of observation” that recount slow journeys across the Po Valley, and on the film Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial road of the souls, [1991] 2011), a pseudo-documentary of a bus journey by friends and family to decidedly non-touristic places, many of which also appear in Verso la foce. All of Celati’s films, while resisting easy categorization, might be called anti-documentary documentaries, in that they recount how any comprehensive sense of the reality of the external world is ultimately un-documentable. They perform what Scott MacDonald (2013) calls the key task of ecocinema, “to provide new kinds of film experience that demonstrate an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship and help to nurture a more environmentally progressive mindset” (20). Some techniques that Celati employs to “‘retrain’ our perceptions of natural (and human) processes” include what Adrian Ivakhiv (2013a) terms “the use of silence and natural sounds, and [the] foregrounding of subjects—places, landscapes, rivers, changing seasons, and everyday visual and sensory occurrences—that usually serve only as background in mainstream cinema” (129). One difference between Celati’s films and much of the more radically avant-garde cinema that MacDonald tends to focus on is that while experimental and landscape-scaled, they are built on human narratives, albeit largely unscripted ones.

Verso la foce and Strada provinciale delle anime both ask us to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space. The book originated in the company of photographers seeking to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati (1989) describes as “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” (9). In the nearly thirty years since Verso la foce was first published, this phenomenon of what Eugenio Turri (2004, 20) calls “space built on a diffuse urban fabric” has become even more common, symptomatic of the immense megalopolis that sprawls over vast portions of the Po Valley, growing in intensity near larger urban centers, which are often connected by unbroken strips of urban growth along major roads. Stretching over four hundred miles across northern Italy, the Po Valley contains nearly one-third of the country’s total human population, many industries, and some of the most intensively cultivated land in Europe. Water and air pollution continue to plague the area, millions of cubic yards of sand and gravel are dredged (often illegally) from the riverbed, long stretches of the river’s banks are dominated by geometric plantations of poplars that are harvested for cellulose, and countless former small farms have been abandoned as large-scale industrial agricultural holdings have proliferated. As Iovino (2012) points out, rather than a bioregion, the Po Valley often resembles a “necroregion” wherein “the ‘stories’ and ‘wisdom’ of places seem on the verge of extinction” (102). There are a few protected areas that partially offset the relative sterility of the more intensively exploited zones, notably the Po Delta Regional Park where the river fans out and runs into the Adriatic Sea, an area of about two hundred square miles that has in recent years seen the return of various species of wildlife. There are also many fascinating older urban centers and various early canal systems, some from the sixteenth century that over time have partially melded into surrounding landscapes—yet dead zones of speculation or abandonment are never far away.

Verso la foce traverses the valley in four narrative sections beginning with journeys taken in the days following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and then—stepping back and forth in time—wanders downstream along levees, in and out of towns, through areas of reclaimed land, and ends in the delta. The book resists formal literary narrative structures, bringing together moments of perception, observation, and reflection with situated writing in order to render a sense of space as “multiplicity always unraveled, always unraveling” (Celati 2006, 120). As much an exploration of perception and memory as it is of place and space, the book is a series of carefully selected, often filmic observations of riverine landscapes at turns depressingly degraded and at others unexpectedly welcoming in their palimpsest entanglements of human and nonhuman presence. Celati’s observational gaze treats every scene as something at once immediately encountered yet also countlessly remembered along “numerous approaches or stimuli [that] converge upon it and lead to it,” creating place-based “radial systems” of illuminative “words, comparisons, [and] signs” that he builds around each set of images (Berger [1980] 1991, 67). Celati seeks to expose each location that he describes—in the spirit of John Berger’s ordinary-extraordinary field—simultaneously as “a space awaiting events,” as a space containing various partly perceived events, and as “an event in itself” (Berger [1980] 1991, 204).

In spare, concentrated prose focused on close-up details of the external world, Celati attempts the difficult task, as Monica Seger (2015) notes, of imbuing “his writing with the not-yet-filtered sensation of initial comprehension” (75). He looks for meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he writes in his introductory note to Verso la foce, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost” (1989, 10). Berger writes in his essay “The River Po” that the films of Michelangelo Antonioni “question the visible until there’s not enough light to see any more” (2001, 136). Celati’s writings have a similar quality, and a similar hope that “as we peer, something will come to meet us, something that almost escaped him, something so real that it doesn’t have a name” (Berger 2001, 136).

Celati, who like Antonioni grew up in Ferrara close to the Po River and was similarly influenced by the enigmatic landscapes of the surrounding plain, writes of a “reopening” of environmental awareness in Antonioni’s films—in their many “still moments, lingering aimless gazes and gestures, the steadiness of the frontal views” (2011d, 30). With this sense of sustained outward perception, “all places become observable,” beautiful and ugly alike, with the very act of pausing to linger in places becoming a sign of “our inhabiting the earth, in the realm of the indeterminate. When we stop sensing the landscape as the realm of the indeterminate, and thus beyond description, it means that our environmental comprehension has gone to pot” (31). This lingering in places in order to heighten complex areal perception is evident throughout Strada provinciale delle anime, which revisits many ideas and places earlier encountered in Verso la foce, with the shared aim to give vocal and visual substance to “spaces marginalized or simply ignored by memory-tradition” (Celati 1975, 221). As Rebecca West (1992) notes, the film “seeks to transcend the limits of traditionally linguistic representations by heightening our awareness of the eloquence of silence, of seeing and being seen, and of the body’s role in imagining and reasoning alike” (370).

Strada provinciale certainly has many quiet moments and images of people moving slowly through or resting in outdoor spaces, drawing on what Celati (2011a) calls “il disponibile quotidiano” (the accessible everyday)—everything in landscapes, welcoming and unwelcoming alike, that passes on around us (10). The diegetic soundtrack of the film is attuned to the encompassing soundscape of the journey and shifts from anthropophonic sounds such as the voices of the pas...