In “Fireflies,” I take up a famous allegorical tale written by Pier Paolo Pasolini before his death about the disappearance of fireflies in 1960s Italy due to the spread of industrial poison. Fireflies become both a point of entry to address the dire consequences of Italy’s postwar modernization during the country’s so-called “economic miracle” as well as a poetic image that allows us to think through the nexus of aesthetics and environmental catastrophe. The sensory perception and representation of landscape are explored in this chapter through the work of filmmakers inspired by the project of anthropology—Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and, among others, Cecilia Mangini—who in those years approached the question of industrial modernity in Italy against the backdrop of what became an ideological progressivist re-education of the senses. Inevitably, the allegory of the fireflies brings me to address its role in a “material-discursive” understanding of poison. Responding with a sense of aesthetic urgency to the ways in which toxicity makes itself increasingly present as a material reality in Southern Italy today, the chapter also suggests a consideration for the visual representation of a contemporary artist from Taranto, Alessandra Guttagliere, and her use of photography in capturing the ghostly temporalities of postindustrial poisonous landscapes (see image above). At stake throughout the chapter is thus the role of aesthetic practitioners as bearers of crucial conceptual insights for understanding what Pasolini calls the deep anthropological fractures of modernity.

“The Ends of Poison,” deals with the possession ritual of tarantismo in Puglia through the work of anthropologist Ernesto De Martino that rooted itself in areas of Southern Italy proximate to Taranto in the 1950s and 60s. Largely via a thoroughgoing examination of De Martino’s work, this chapter addresses the question of cultural loss, which is intimated in Pasolini’s tale of vanishing fireflies, by which he mourned the gestures and rites of a preindustrial past in Italy. Yet the chapter sheds light on the technique of possession itself, its mise-en-scène of a poisonous alliance between a woman and a spider as a mode of recovery from what De Martino called the “crisis of presence,” a dialectical concept operating in relation to the notion of cultural loss. Calling on my work in the De Martino archive, the chapter delves into the significance of such a crisis, of which possession forms a part, by paying closer attention not only to De Martino’s unedited notes and other forms of footage (including that taken by his team), but also to his posthumous theoretical work on the apocalypse, “La fine del mondo”, which has gained a renewed interest today in the efforts to think through global meltdown and environmental catastrophe. By locating specific scenes in this work that speak to the profound sense of disorientation (spaesamento) due to the metamorphosis and destruction of landscapes within psychiatric literature, I attempt to read De Martino against the grain, finding prophetic clues to re-read the very landscapes of Puglia where he had conducted research in the 1960s.

The central conceit of “The Scorpion on the Letter,” stems from Ernesto De Martino’s research in Puglia on tarantismo, yet focuses on a form of dialogic fieldwork that extended for six years (1959-1965) beyond his reach through an epistolary exchange between two women: a tarantata and an ethnographer-photographer from Rome, Annabella Rossi. By considering moments when poison appears in the writings of the possessed woman, the chapter reflects on the rhythms of toxicity when it is mediated through writing. In doing so, I try to problematize the study of corporeal phenomena in its inevitable rendering through language and text, even in the case of a possession ritual that relies on the literal enfleshment of a poisonous spider. Such a problematic, I argue, poses crucial questions about the dialogic practice of ethnography—and its poisonous intimacies—while uncovering its relationship with Gramscian politics and feminist practices in Italy in the 1970s. In the end, I reflect on what a feminist ethnographic practice makes possible for the study of toxicity today.

“Tristezza Siderurgica: Gestures of Return,” deploys the dialogic relationship between two women in the present—Taranto artist Isabella Mongelli and myself—as a concrete example of the ways in which artists have approached the environmental catastrophe in Taranto. Of particular interest is the way in which artists have sought to redress the ecological crisis through a mobilization of the senses that uncovers what Jacques Rancière has called different “distributions of the sensible.” These different planes are crucial for understanding the logics of poison as it vacillates between visibility and invisibility. Further, the chapter helps us trace the stakes of the relationship between art (as an autonomous realm) and politics (as direct action), through uncovering the relevance of sensory experience and affect in the study of environmental crisis. By giving an overview of Mongelli’s photographic and theatrical work in Taranto upon returning to her hometown after years abroad, the chapter locates the expression of a specific affect: “tristezza siderurgica” (the ‘sorrow of steel’, an Italian expression coined by sound artist Alessandra Eramo in a poem written in 2005), and a verb “stare”: to stay. The chapter identifies affinities between what De Martino called the “crisis of presence” and what Mongelli expresses as a profound sense of estrangement—both endured and performed. Art-making appears as one possible mode of recovery, one waged via aesthetic techniques meant to both express and manage the everyday life of slow poisoning.

Approaching the aesthetic response to Southern Italy’s eco crisis, “Visions of Dust” addresses this crisis via the sensory perception of residents and laborers themselves. In this chapter, I am particularly interested in what I observed in one of the most contaminated areas in the city: Taranto’s cemetery, the city of the dead. This space is so proximate to the steel factory that it was completely covered with “minerale”: the toxic iron ore dust which, in penetrating the cemetery, transgresses the boundaries between life, death, and labor. By drawing on photographs taken by cemetery custodians at night—and the glittering images by way of which they inadvertently captured dust falling from the sky—the chapter reflects on the ghostly presence of toxicity and the way it troubles the absence of death. In particular, the chapter focuses on a remediation process (the “bonifica”) that took place in 2019 and demanded the unburial and displacement of the remains of hundreds of children to purify contaminated soil. The cemetery of Taranto thus became the ultimate environmental crime scene, where people were driven by forensic desire and yet forced to contend with the troubling uncertainty of what was truly being uncovered: was it toxicity, or the deceased loved ones themselves—both reduced to the volatile, precarious matter of dust? The chapter ultimately poses questions on the relationship between image and death when these images are “poisonous”—that is to say, confronted with and complicated by the question of contagion.

“The Word ‘Wig,’” focuses on an object as a gateway into the question of illness in Taranto: the wigs worn by women undergoing chemotherapy. In this chapter I focus on the labor of a man who, although he is not directly involved in the environmental struggle nor does he work in the steel factory, senses his profession to be intimately tied to Taranto’s fate, as he attempts to offer temporary aesthetic relief to women about to undergo significant corporeal changes. The chapter evokes how individuals in a situation of ongoing crisis invent strategies and techniques to conceive and deal with past, present, and future—to craft an ethics of responsibility towards themselves and others, which often manifests itself as the struggle against a continual sense of incoherence. In this chapter, I thus pick up on how the wig man and his clients find themselves navigating such murky waters, straddling the perilous lines between humor and seriousness, taboo and transgression, despair and endurance. Propelled by cultural and family-learned techniques, wigmaker and wig-wearer improvise with words and things, questioning the value of aesthetics—both as an art/technique and as a corporeal value allegedly worth preserving.

“‘Sanare:’ Healing Across Generations” brings together the underlying intergenerational threads that traverse most of the preceding chapters: from the inheritance of an intellectual history to the material relationships had by the living to the dead and ill. The text focuses on “sanare”, which in Italian means to purify, to heal, and also to pay a debt. By identifying forms of responsibility across generations as they deal with the history of the city from different vantage points, I show how the uncertain future of the city is understood as a theater of relations between “parents” and “children.” This means considering not only the material transmission and accumulation of poison over generations but also the political culture and psychoanalytic discourse that has been inherited and must, to some degree, be overcome to imagine new futures for Taranto—futures that move beyond the conundrum of an “ecological contradiction” between “production” and “reproduction,” and toward a struggle to preserve the environment and its multiplicity of life-forms.