Letizia Bonanno

How can the future be imagined, told and reclaimed when people’s livelihood mostly depends on what would likely threaten their life? My project seeks to answer this question by engaging in a collective, multimodal storytelling process with people living in the port city of Taranto, Southern Italy. The city has grown in the shadow of ILVA, the biggest steel plant of Europe: while the plant has, since 1960s, given people from Taranto the means for livelihoods, it has also cast a long shadow of toxicity and pollution, contributing to the progressive environmental degradation of the city and its inhabitants’ health deterioration. Utilising both traditional and multimodal methods, the project will offer a timely contribution to recent debates on the methodological and epistemological affordances of multimodal anthropologies. Furthermore, it will enrich contemporary scholarly dialogues on sustainable futures in contexts of socio-economic precarity and environmental degradation, as well as on post-Fordist imaginations in the Southern European periphery.