Ecologies of Performance:

Environmental Violence and Embodied Resistance in Southern Italy’s Land of Fires

Principal Investigator: Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia 

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Funding: Young Researchers (PNRR)  

Project Duration: 36 months (15/05/2025 – 14/05/2028) 

Keywords: environment, aesthetics, anthropology, performance, theater, images, toxicity

This research project combines anthropological approaches and collaborative performance arts, to study environmental movements in southern Italy, near Mount Vesuvius volcano—an area on the outskirts of Naples where the burning of illegal toxic waste have led to increased rates of disease, and prompted strong forms of activism by the local population. Bringing together ethnographic and theater-based methods, this research seeks to trace the “ecologies of performance” through which communities respond to the upset of their environments. 

(More soon)

Preliminary References

Pisapia, Jasmine. “Vessel and Voice: Collaborative Theater-Making and In-Situ Creations in New York and Naples,” International workshop Images, Sound, and Performance as Ways of Knowing co-organized by Valentina Bonifacio and Lisa Stevenson, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, 4-8 March 2024. 

Pisapia, Jasmine and Valentina Bonifacio. “Of Fireworks and Fireflies: Apotropaic Performances in Anthropology,” introduction to the Italian translation of Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non Mastery in the Age of Meltdown: Michael Taussig, L’arte del non-dominio nell’era dello sfaldamento globale, trans. Michele Bandiera and Enrico Milazzo for the colletivo epidemia (Milano: Meltemi, 2023). 

Pisapia, Jasmine, and Isabella Mongelli. “Per un’antropologia estetica della crisi ecologica: Teatro, arti visive, e ‘crisi della presenza’ nella città di Taranto.” Antropologia 9, no. 3 (2022), 111-132.