1183 | 750 | “A world that is no longer yours”: slow violence, loss and recovery of the landscape in extreme Ionian Calabria | Giovanni Modaffari
Over the last few centuries, the landscape of the southernmost part of Calabria has been one of the favourite subjects of artists and writers such as R. de Saint-Non, E. Lear, M. C. Escher, C. Pavese, P. P. Pasolini and others, who have extolled its natural beauty and the fascination exerted by the historical legacy of Magna Graecia._x000D_
After the Second World War, this area has experienced a failed industrialization accompanied by episodes of slow violence at the expense of the environment, be it urban, rural or coastal, whose effects can still be seen today. As well as the socio-economic problems producing inequalities that make it one of the poorest areas in Europe, the southernmost part of Calabria is riddled with illegal building and general environmental degradation._x000D_
In a stretch of coast no more than 60 km long, building projects such as the Liquichimica plant in the Saline Ioniche, the Statale 106 freeway and other infrastructures have produced a missing landscape, in which residential and industrial structures are left unfinished and therefore devoid of any function._x000D_
The first part of this contribution provides a brief history of the landscape of the area, the removal of which could be considered to lie at the basis of a local Shifting baseline syndrome. The second part gives some examples of how the episodes of long-standing slow violence have changed the landscape. Finally, some stories of resistance to such violence are recounted, with appropriate examples such as the museum located below a freeway, the protests that managed to stop a project to open a coal-fired power plant and last but not least, a role for the non-human, with the discovery along the same stretch of coast of a large nesting area for sea-turtles._x000D_
Giovanni Modaffari
University of Milano-Bicocca
ID Abstract: 750