Talk: Italian Journeys

In Terra Infecta, Andrea Bagnato traces a political ecology of the Italian landscape. The book, recently published by MACK, uses the lens of health and illness to explore how the modern quest for sanitation shaped Italy's urban and rural landscapes through architecture, demolition, and displacement. The result of a decade of research and fieldwork supported in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation, Terra Infecta recounts histories of dispossession and resistance in Naples, Venice, Milan, and Matera.

Andrea Bagnato is joined by Jennifer Scappettone for a reading and conversation. Drawing from their respective research and writing, Bagnato and Scappettone discuss the long-term markings that fascism, internal colonialism, and modernization have left on the physical environment, and how different narrative forms can help us make sense of ecological change.

Andrea Bagnato is an architect and writer based in Genoa, Italy. He has taught at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam; the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), London; and the Decolonizing Architecture program at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Previous books include the collective volumes Rights of Future Generations (Hatje Cantz, 2022) and the Graham-funded A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (Columbia, 2019). He was the recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant for the Terra Infecta project.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, and is professor of literature and faculty affilate of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books of poetry, translations and prose, including most recently Poetry After Barbarism, The Republic of Exit 43, and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice.
Presented with support from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Chicago.

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