Soil Relations: Neo-colonialism in contemporary Italian landscape

To all the survivors of border violence.

I recognize my privilege in writing about migration and exploitation in Italy without being affected by it. Therefore, I orient my practice in solidarity with the communities who are targeted by these unequal treatments and adopt a decolonial and anti-racist approach in the way I analyse space and policies.

Special thank you to my tutor George Jepson for the support and to my best friend Ginevra for always engaging in conversation over the topic.

CONTENT Dictionary

List of figures

Introduction

PART 1: Italian colonialism and agriculture

Fascist agrarian policies Libya and the Southern question

PART 2: Colonial hangover in contemporary capitalist agriculture

Foreign bodies as the new land Weaponizing soil for nationalism

PART 3: Soil as Relation

Borders Seeds and soil

Conclusion

Bibliography

Dictionary

Pomodoro: italian for tomato, latin root “pomum aureus”, from which “Pomo” (apple or pommel) and “d’oro” (of gold).

Xitomalt: Aztech for tomato

Caporalato: agro-mafious recruitment system where “caporali” are the middleman between the farm workers and the farm owners.

Puglia: Southeast region of Italy

Braccianti: (Italian) meaning “a pair of arms” picking produce are called

EPA: Economic Partnership Agreement

ACP: African Caribbean Pacific countries

EU: European Union

WTO: World Trade Organization

IMF: International Monetary Fund

WBG: World Bank Group

FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization

UN: United Nations

UNECE: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

SPS: The sanitary and phytosanitary measures

CAP: Common Agricultural Policy

Bonifica: from Italian meaning “reclamation”

List of Figures

Illustration 1: Italian colonialism and agriculture map

Figure 1 Boz, Milo. [n.d.]. Agro-Pontino Marshes, Reclamation Project (Before), Dalvenetoalmondo <https://dalvenetoalmondoblog.blogspot.com/2017/01/il-miracolo-dellagro-pontino-e-i-coloni.html> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Figure 2 Agro-Pontino Marshes, Reclamation Project (During). [n.d.]. L’Intellettuale Dissidente <https://www.lintellettualedissidente.it/controcultura/societa/grand-tour-pontino-viaggio-sul-canalemussolini/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Figure 3. Screenshot from google maps, Gran Ghetto di Foggia, <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gran+Ghetto/@41.5905948,15.5628503,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3 m4!1s0x133765a8090a1377:0xdf7f2c9b68aa241a!8m2!3d41.5905908!4d15.565039> [accessed 01 April 2022]

Figure 4 Rivista Dell’IAO ‘L’Agricoltura Coloniale’, 1921. [n.d.]. Toscana Novecento

<http://www.toscananovecento.it/custom_type/listituto-agronomico-per-loltremare-di-firenze-e-lacooperazione-italiana-in-libia-negli-anni-cinquanta/?print=print> [accessed 1 February 2022]

Figure 5 Alpozzi, Alberto. 2021. Plowing of the steppe near Azziza, Tripolania, Tripolania, L’italia Coloniale, <https://italiacoloniale.com/2021/05/25/colonialismo-italiano-lagricoltura-sperimentale-intripolitania/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Figure 6 Alpozzi, Alberto. 2021.

Experimental Agrarian Institute of Sidi Mesri, Tripolania, L’italia Coloniale, <https://italiacoloniale.com/2021/05/25/colonialismo-italiano-lagricoltura-sperimentale-intripolitania/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Figure 7. Map prepared by Border Forensic in collaboration with Alarm Phone, Charles Heller, from REPOSSESSION: the RCA School of Architecture International Lecture Series: From the Wall to the Sea: The Translocal Politics of (Anti-)Apartheid with Charles Heller (Border Forensics) & Nandita Sharma, Royal College of Art London, zoom conference, (25 november 2021)

Illustration 2: Supply chain of the global trade and migration around tomatoes, between Italy and Ghana

Figure 8. Poeta, Mario. [n.d.]. Abandoned Tomato Fields in Tamale, North-East Ghana, Internazionale, the Dark Side of the Italian Tomato <https://www.internazionale.it/webdoc/tomato/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Illustration 3: Soil Relation

Figure 9. Contini, Leone. 2021. Monte Purgatorio, Cantica21 <https://www.cantica21.it/artista/leonecontini/#images-1> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Figure 10. Monte Stella. [n.d.]. Parco Monte Stella <https://parcomontestella.it/events/i-sentieri-delmonte-stella/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

Introduction

Land has been at the core of Italian politics since the unification of the peninsula into one country in 1861. From the colonial enterprise, the Fascist rule under Mussolini, up until today, the Italian agricultural landscape and rural communities have been subjected to policies that try to rationalize the relationship of individuals to soil for political means. Therefore, how is soil instrumental in Italian politics (and policies) to define and oppress people?

Across these different historical periods, Agrarian policies and infrastructures reveal a continuation of the same cyclical set of interests: domination and profit. During the colonial and fascist rule, soil was used as a gatekeeper for national identity, today contemporary agro-capitalist agriculture, especially in the south of Italy, resonate similar imperialist dynamics over people and soil. Questioning constructs of national identity based on the relation to soil and cultivation, carried out by internal and external colonization projects during Fascist Italy, will highlight the danger of falling into nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric today

The theoretical construction of the “Other”, racism and hostility towards migrant seasonal workers (originating especially from Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and North Africa) fueled by the media, the population and the state, come together to expose the hangover of Italian colonialism in the contemporary agricultural landscape.

Racial capitalism functions on the inscription of certain bodies within hierarchies of gender, class and race, a necessary categorization for commodifying labour power1 These bodies are signified through space and land. Borders and agricultural fields act as sites of othering and are complicit in constructing the

status and image of the “illegal” migrant

Scholar Ariella Azoulay describes archives as imperial technologies that legitimize and perpetrate oppression2. Once you abstract someone or something by means of a document they may become defined by it. In the same way, agrarian, border and migration policies are inscriptions on land and bodies that produce spatial consequences. The architecture of borders and plantations are both spatial actors and products of policies. Facilitating the process of hierarchization allows for the continuation of extractive practices within the Italian rural landscape and society.

By diving into the work of people who build alternative circuits of care relating to agriculture and migration in Italy today, I will analyze the ways in which soil can acquire different meanings that go beyond its attachment to territoriality and national identity, towards potentially transcending borders.

1 Anna Tsing, Supply Chains and the Human Condition, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 21:2, 148-176, (2009)

2 Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Verso Books, (19 novembre 2019), Chapter 1 - p.59-61.

Part 1: Italian colonialism and agriculture

Fascist agrarian policies

In rural 19th and early 20th century Italy, a feeling of common care prevailed and informed intracommunity support and maintenance of the natural environment for long term-growth. This approach can be summarized through the concept of “campanellismo”, which meant that individuals were tied to their city and natural surroundings were not privatized, but rather seen as a shared good. For instance, farming communities had the right to define their local land tenure rules, and access to local rivers, forests and streams was a common right.3 When capitalist agriculture was introduced, these dynamics started changing. The conceptualization of nature shifted towards equating land to profit, which was a result of the privatization of land4

The projects and policies designed by the Fascist government illustrate this shift. As Italy was unified in 1861, it it a relatively young state, therefore the control of agricultural modernization was partly idealized as the method for creating an Italian national sentiment both in Italy and in its colonies.

Under Mussolini’s regime, a series of “Bonifica” projects began across Italy. These were large infrastructural projects who aim was cleansing and reclaiming marshes into arable agricultural land with internal re-settlement schemes. The narrative around entire swamp landscapes associated waste land to unproductivity, which was the supreme nemesis of capitalistic ideals. Moral prejudices and economic conviction were projected as new meaning onto the land and its people: for instance, local rural communities were seen as dirty pests5 and the marshes as malaria-ridden, unhygienic and in need of cleansing. These projects also included the design of new towns for re-settled families.6 Families from the north of Italy were relocated to the south. For example, families from the Veneto region were moved to the Agro Pontino Marches near Rome. The second most important project was in the Tavogliere della Puglia, in the southeast region One of the fascist cities built with it was Borgo La Serpe, now Borgo Mezzanone.

Libya and the Southern question

In parallel to the “Bonifica” projects on national territory, similar efforts were carried out in the African colonies, agriculture being one of the main tenets of the colonial enterprise. The increase in population at the end of 19th century and the challenge of domestic agriculture to satisfy demand pushed King Vittorio Emanuele’s government to expand its colonizing mission to East African countries.7 Following the same path as

3 Joshua B. Forrest, Local Autonomy as a Human Right: The Quest for Local Self-Rule, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2022

4 Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons, Antipode, 47, 999– 1020, (2005),

<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1111%2Fanti.12143>

5 Irene Peano, Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave, E-flux Architecture (October 2021), < https://www.e-flux. com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411213/specters-of-eurafrica-inan-italian-agroindustrial-enclave/>

6 Mary T. Boatwright & Mia Fuller, Colonial Cities and Imperial Citizens, Lecture webinar, 24 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xrVtGMGqyA

7 Mohanty, ibid, p.950

other European colonizers, Italy sought colonies to remediate the challenges of postunification. A considerable number of the southern population started migrating for better economic opportunities abroad. This “exodus” felt humiliating to the newly born Italian state who wanted to assert its power against other European nations. Italy began losing a considerable part of its labour power and saw in its colonies the potential of relocating these populations through agricultural schemes.

The colonial campaign in Libya and Eritrea were planned as solutions to the southern question. In Eritrea, the Italian government appointed deputy Leopold Franchetti in 1889 to produce reports on the state of land. He described land as abandoned, villages vacant and the natives as having no major ties to the land. These statements were used to justify violent expropriation policies in the Eritrean highlands8, playing into similar narrative of indigenous mismanagement of land by other colonizing nations9 .

In colonial Libya, the landscape was instrumentalized on a political level with the idea of reconstructing the idealized image of the Roman Empire. Indeed, botanical similarities between the two regions marked the heritage of ancient Rome, implicitly stating that the land inherently belonged to Italy. The presence of olive trees in the 1930s echoed ancient texts’ description of a fertile land 10. In a way, the Fascist-era processes of spatial reclamation seemed to draw inspiration, as well as legitimacy, from literature of the Ancient Roman era. While Imperial land was linked to fertility and flourish, the desertic Libyan landscape was exemplified in opposition as consequence of local communities’ inept land management11. This dualistic and simplistic interpretation of the landscape was used to discard the local communities’ way of living (nomadic) and legitimize the violence carried by colonial Italy against them. Indeed, Nomadism was fought against and associated to soil degradation. The Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain) of Cyrenaica was an extremely fertile region which was chosen by the Italians to become the farmer-settler utopia. Bedouin communities were forced into open air camps where many lost their lives.12 Settler colonial agriculture was pedestalled as the ultimate model for the obtention of land ownership and identity. This process of reclamation was carried out by the opening of the Experimental Agrarian Institute of Sidi Mesri in Tripolania, where Italian agronomists were sent to test the soil. Today, land remains at the core of nationalist Italian politics, where spatial strategies are employed to segregate and entrench migrant communities from mixing with white Italian society.

8 Mohanty, Pramod Kumar, and Aron Andemichael. “Colonialism in Africa: a case of Italian land policy in Eritrean Highlands ” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 71, 2010, pp. 950–58, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/44147563.> Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.

9 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University press, (May 2018) , Introduction, p.3.

10 Michele Monserrati, The Barren Mediterranean: Rural Imaginary in Italian Colonial Libya, UC Berkeley: California Italian Studies, (2020),

<https://www.academia.edu/44841221/The_Barren_Mediterranean_Rural_Imaginary_in_Italian_Colonia l_Libya>

11 Monserrati, Ibid.

12 Mia Fuller, Tripoli, Libya: Scale and (IM)mobility in the control of colonial territory, February 27, 2017, The Funambulist, Issue 10: Architecture & Colonialism, <https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/10architecture-colonialism/tripoli-libya-scale-immobility-control-colonial-territory-mia-fuller>

Part 2: Contemporary capitalist agriculture and Italian colonial hangover

Foreign bodies as the new land

The contemporary Italian rural landscape is haunted by a colonial “hangover”, which is pervasive and apparent today in the relationships between state, population, migration flows and agricultural practices.

Prior to capitalism, agriculture was carried out locally by feudal societies and communities who would trade with each other. Colonialism provided Europeans with the opportunity for massive capital accumulation, which colonizers used to dissolve feudal relations in Europe, destroy competing proto-capitalist communities outside Europe, and thus hone on their capacity to accumulate power.13 This political and economic advantage is still present today in the setting of unequal power-dynamics between European countries and the global south. Indeed, this imbalance is specifically disguised through international standards, global trade and border policies that derive from post-colonial independence deals: to actively participate in international trade, newly sovereign African countries were cornered into abiding by the rules and trading norms set in place by Western powers.

The global trade of tomato products between Italy and Ghana is illustrative of the neocolonial dynamic of the free trade system and the violence of supply chain capitalism. In the region of Puglia, southeast of Italy, seasonal migrant workers are exploited by “caporale” systems, which consists of mafia landowners who recruit migrants without regular work and/or residency permits These workers, some of which are originally from Ghana, pick tomatoes under exploitative circumstances, which are then canned by Italian companies (such as Salsa14) that export them back to Ghana15 .

West Africa is an extremely lucrative market for Italy since Ghanaian culture shares a long tradition of cooking with tomato Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores brought tomato to West Africa and the Mediterranean around the 15th century by way of colonial routes. The EPA Agreement (Economic Partnership agreement) of the EU-ACP created a free trade market between Europe and the African Caribbean Pacific Countries; however, it did not guarantee full reciprocity since EU agriculture is heavily subsidies and its Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (see illustration 2) ultimately make it incredibly hard for Ghanaian products to enter the European market. In addition, Italian tomato paste benefits from extremely low taxes on import, which gives Italy a competitive advantage over local Ghanaian production of tomatoes.

The tomato plantations in Puglia, and the Ghetto towns within it, isolate the community of migrants from the nearby cities. These settlements are an architectural response to a series of policies and dynamics: the negation of residency permits leads to un-official

13 Blaut, J. M. “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism.” Science & Society, vol. 53, no. 3, 1989, pp. 260–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404472. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.

14 ‘Salsa Product - the Tomato Paste 100% Italian’. [n.d.-b]. Www.salsaproduct.com <http://www.salsaproduct.com/eng/> [accessed 17 April 2022]

15 DW Documentary. 2020. ‘Tomatoes and Greed – the Exodus of Ghana’s Farmers | DW Documentary’, YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlPZ0Bev99s> [accessed 20 October 2021]

work contracts, “oral” recruitment, and vulnerability in the workplace16 . Migrant workers are not offered accommodation, and the difficulty of access to transport forces them to live in precarious conditions in proximity to the plantations. Moreover, migrants are often faced with racism when attempting to rent apartments in the city17 , which excludes them from the housing market. All these processes further the “othering” tactics that aggravate migrants’ invisibility, perpetuating and fuelling racism within Italian society towards black and brown peoples.

The seasonal nature of harvests causes migrant workers to live in of constant mobility between farms. Their mistreatment is hidden, geographically dispersed, and disconnected from everyday urban life, building upon a “politics of distant suffering”18 that echoes the violence enacted on the colonized populations abroad, without being perceived or acknowledged by Italian nationals. To an extent, the fear and war against nomadism may be revived from the Bedouin communities in Libya to the migrant communities of today. The strategic creation of the itinerant migrant worker plays into the colonial and capitalistic rhetoric of rejecting non-settled communities.19 Workers on plantations can only sell their labour power without owning their means of production, which is exemplified by the Italian term for harvest pickers, “braccianti”, which derives from “braccia” meaning “arms” or “arm-peoples”. Indeed, this economic model has not so much been changed, but rather remolded to fit into a new supply chain and type of production.

Harvest work is paid based on the amount of product migrants manage to accumulate in a crate (7 cents/ 1 kg of tomatoes20) rather than by hourly standards and a formal paycheck that would guarantee social support. The shift from colonial agriculture to contemporary practices restructures the extraction to happen directly in Italy over the “foreign” body. In the agro-alimentary sector in Italy, the migrant is exploited directly on national territory in a way that divorces the Italian soil from the “foreign” body who labors it, creating a metaphorical no man’s land in which foreign labor can be exploited because workers are not formally recognized by the nation, have no claim over the territory, and can thus be silenced in the eyes of the law.

16 Is.cco. 2017. ‘The Dark Side of Italian Tomato’, Vimeo <https://vimeo.com/198180150> [accessed 17 October 2021]

17 Interview with Paola Farcella from Diritti a Sud (non-profit organization offering legal advice to migrants), Nardò, Puglia, December 2021

18 Scalia, Laura J. Review of Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, by L. Boltanski

Political Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2001, pp. 199–202, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791912. [Accessed 15 Apr. 2022.]

19 Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention, Cornell University Press, (2019)

20 ‘Caporalato, Continua La Polemica in Puglia: “Pomodoro a 7 Centesimi al Chilo”’. 2016. L’Immediato <https://www.immediato.net/2016/06/25/caporalato-continua-la-polemica-in-puglia-pomodoro-a-7centesimi-al-chilo/> [accessed 17 November 2021]

Weaponizing soil for nationalist and xenophobic claims

The invisibility of migrant labor and the romanticization of the “made in Italy” slogan illudes us that agriculture is practiced solely by Italian farmers, following local cultivation practices and traditions.

The construction of whiteness against the foreign body or “other” is a strategy used to reinforce Italian national identity in opposition to “being a migrant”. Therefore, the segregation of migrant workers to Ghetto towns and the attacks on these settlements demonstrate an intent to prevent these communities from participating, and most importantly belonging, to Italian society.

As previously mentioned, the tomato embodies the pride of Italian culture and cuisine, however its history in colonial routes trace the fruit back to its origins in central America. The (unquestioned) obsession with certain products such as tomatoes as nationalistic signifiers restricts the multiple historical realities and cultural lifeworlds21 that are entangled within its production.

The tension between border control and the inflow of migration is creating an inextricable link between nationality and soil. However, political attitudes and EU immigration policies expose a double standard when it comes to conceptualizing migration. In December 2019, the Minister for Internal Affairs Luciana Lamorgese at the local Committee for Order and Public Security in Foggia, spoke of the ghettos as a “plight” that needs to be dealt with. She claimed:

“I deem it necessary to have a bonifica, a bonifica of immigration, because we deal with the issue as one of emergency… but when emergency is every day, it is structural… Maybe we could have a quota system, because they come anyways, and we need them anyways, for the harvests, at certain periods in the year, we need a long-term vision.”

This quote highlights the dependence of the Italian agro-alimentary sector on undocumented migrants. Few months later a decree “Decreto Rilancio: Art.110 bis 13.05.2020: Emersione di rapporti di lavoro” was released, stating where undocumented migrants could apply for permits. The decree proposed a temporary work permit lasting six months: either through self-declaration by the employer or thanks to a job search permit23. However, the process and numbers for applying for permits was limited in

21 “A phenomenological concept (sometimes written as life-world) referring to the everyday world of the shared, ongoing flow of experience, from which we constitute objects and abstract concepts” Scott, John, and Gordon Marshall. "lifeworld." A Dictionary of Sociology : Oxford University Press, . Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 13 Apr. 2022

<https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199533008.001.0001/acref-9780199533008-e1273>

22 Irene Peano, Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave, E-flux Architecture (October 2021), < https://www.e-flux. com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411213/specters-of-eurafrica-inan-italian-agroindustrial-enclave/>

23 Laura Filios, Braccianti agricoli: regolarizzazione primo passo contro la criminalità, Osservatorio Diritti online journal (14 May 2020) < https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/2020/05/14/braccianti-agricolicoronavirus-lavoro-immigrati-decreto-rilancio/>

relation to the number of individuals in precarious conditions who would benefit from such papers. This decree seems to be a post-rationalized solution for amending a broken system.

Industrial agribusinesses and its infrastructure’s final goal is the accumulation of wealth, rather than a strategy towards social good24 The care for soil and people is being lost to profit driven agricultures. Within this framework, the soil is also seen as something to exploit and dominate through the widespread abuse of chemicals that prevent the soil from regenerating.25 This kind of agricultural model is regimented and orchestrated by supply chain capitalism and its consequent social organizations, rather than seasonal and traditional cultivation practices. These unequal supply chains construct the social order we live in.

The industrial agricultural field is immediately contingent to the delimitation of borders. In Border as method or the Multiplication of Labour, Sandro Mazzadro and Brett Neilson analyse how the hardening of borders creates the condition under which the continuation of exploitative practices is made possible in a post-slavery global order26 . European countries, such as Italy, are capitalizing on cheap migrant labour: wealth accumulation relies on politics of racism, and subjects are racialized define who can belong to the nation-state, and who is excluded, and can thus be subordinated to cultivating the soil.27 European immigration policies legitimize border violence, as if the cause of migration was not linked to the presence of Europe abroad through global trade policies and corporations.

Through the tomato case study (see illustration 2), we can see that economic migration from Ghana to Italy represents an ongoing vicious cycle within the agricultural industry: trade policies are crafted to benefit the West, which gives European agricultural products advantage on the Ghanaian market, making the country unable to rely in its own agricultural production and dependent on European imports. Given the meagre economic opportunities offered on national level, Ghanaians are prompted to migrate elsewhere in the hope for better economic opportunities, but they are ultimately trapped as undocumented workers in Italian tomato plantations, cultivating products that will be shipped back to their home country. In addition to this cross-border destruction of livelihoods, migrant workers are further rendered legally invisible in the agricultural process due to their lack of connection to Italian nationality.

Border violence (mistreatment in detention camps, rejection at border, racism…) represents an injustice given the fact that Ghanaians are pushed to migrate because of this vicious cycle initiated by western global trade policies.

24 Matheus Hoffmann Pfrimer and Ricardo César Barbosa Júnior, Neo-Agro-Colonialism, Control over Life, and Imposed Spatio-Temporalities, February 2017, Contexto Internacional 39(1):3-33

25 Interview with Federico Ascheri, Italian agronomist, over the phone, December 2021

26 “The control of labor mobility is also one of the key sites where the expanding frontiers of capital continue to intertwine with political and legal borders. Here the production of labor power as a commodity is a key issue.” From Borders as Method, Chapter 3: Frontiers of Capital

27 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University press, (May 2018)

Part 3: Soil as Relation

Borders

In Manthia Diawara’s movie One World in Relation, Édouard Glissant describes his perception of borders: “I find it quite pleasant to pass from one atmosphere to another through crossing a border. We need to put an end to the idea of a border that defends and prevents. Borders must be permeable; they must not be weapons against migration or immigration processes.”

How can we adopt a more expansive view of agriculture and cultivation practices that go beyond these fixed pre-constructions of signifying identity?

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant presents the “right to opacity”28 as an ethical/political claim and condition for relationships. Opacity is for him the opposite of transparency. The Enlightenment rationale, which presumes universal truths and values, bases multicultural communication on the requirement of transparency. However, comprehension from the Latin verb ‘com-prendere’ meaning to take with, requires the act of appropriating and measuring someone to a set of values that doesn’t necessarily belong to them Andrea Gremels recapitulates Glissant’s concepts by stating that “Opacity tries to overcome the risk of reducing, normalizing and even assimilating the singularities of cultural differences by comprehension. […] Opacity, instead, offers a de-hierarchized world-vision as well as a discourse complementary to universal or systemic approaches to globalization. It reflects on uncontrollable “confluences” and an increasing intermingling of diversities, both of which oppose monolithic worldviews.”

29

Borders are used as ways to define who is within, and who is without. Instead, we could reimagine borders as the point of communication and conversation between differences. Borders between countries and individuals, both physical and conceptual, become a place of learning from rather than of wanting to comprehend. Why should borders and soil be indicators of national identity, and why may they not be ways of relating to each other? This essentialization between identity and land leaves no space to question the current economic model for alternative ways of existing together.

28 Édouard Glissant. 2009. Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press) <https://www.press.umich.edu/10262/poetics_of_relation>

29 Andrea Gremels, Keywords in transcultural English studies, Opacité / Opacity (Édouard Glissant), Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, <http://www.transcultural-english-studies.de/opacite-opacity-edouardglissant/>

Seeds and soil

Relation is a constitutive element of seed culture

In fact, seeds need to be exchanged and re-planted to prevent a particular seed from expiring, which means it can no longer sprout and its variety goes lost.30 Our contemporary diet is a mosaic of histories, with the movement of seeds and people across continents passing through human and nonhuman agents, even prior to colonialism. Similarly, agricultural practices must be passed down between generations. Hence, purist views of agriculture constitute an erasure of the various histories of the hands through which these seeds have passed through. Indeed, Italian culture is also a product of migration processes. Many of the traditional Italian cultural practices, from recipes to architecture, for instance in Sicily (Southern Italy) have been influenced by the Arab community of Saracens, who occupied the region in the 1st century AD.31 Food is easily accepted as a relation to other cultures, however when it comes to people the process seems more tumultuous.

What would it mean to re-signify borders and agricultural practices for different soil relations? In his practice Leone Contini (artist and anthropologist) engages with questions of identity, cultivation, and colonialism. In his work Monte Purgatorio, he composed a pyramidal sculpture made of industrial building debris to symbolize ruins, from which a pumpkin seed germinates at the top. The sculpture is a contemporary take on post-WW2 landscaping projects across Europe that used the debris from bombings to create artificial mounts for public spaces dedicated to leisure. An example of these public spaces is Monte Stella in Milan These landscapes are built upon the repurposed ruins of a violent past. Some citizens might not even be aware of their history. Today these parks are integral parts of the city and citizens life. These designs reveal the intention of building a new urban identity after the war by hiding the debris and perhaps avoiding reckoning with the violence of the past. These urban projects seem unresolved way of memorializing and relating to history.

On the other hand, Leone’s sculpture puts the ruins of modernity on display, which he describes are extractive, warmonger, colonial and genocidal 32 The sculpture’s metaphor of life thriving from exposed ruins indicates the possibility of something different arising from a messy composition of various parts and pasts. Each piece of debris is a stranger to the other, no single one dominates the mount. The artist explains that from shaky ruins cannot be built a strong nationalistic identity, clearly referencing back, and opposing the fascist narrative of creating the Italian identity on a connection of blood to soil33 .

30 From a conversation with Federico Ascheri, an Italian agronomist who has been exchanging seeds for the past 35 years.

31 Nast, Condé, ‘La Cucina Arabo Siciliana, Un’unione Vincente’, La Cucina Italiana, (2019), <https://www.lacucinaitaliana.it/news/in-primo-piano/la-cucina-arabo-siciliana-ununione-vincente/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

32 ‘Monte Purgatorio - Cantica21’. [n.d.]. <https://www.cantica21.it/artista/leone-contini/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

33 Conversation with Leone Contini at the Cantina21: Dante Alighieri and the Italian artist exhibition opening at Istituto Italiano di Cultura (IIC), Paris, 13/04/2022-11/05/2022, <https://www.cantica21.it/cantica21-dante/>

Another interesting part of his practice is his work with migrant farming communities in his hometown in Tuscany. Engaging with Chinese farmers that have been cultivating Chinese vegetables for their community. They have been introducing new seeds, some of which are cousins with Italian varieties. Having been faced with migrating to a different continent and changing soil type once already, the Chinese farmers have demonstrated a higher level of climate adaptability in face of climate change compared with local Tuscan farmers.34 Indeed, they have developed a new soil knowledge through their diasporic experience.35 Nevertheless, the local authorities and media have been targeting these communities with racism and confiscations, instead of seeing the potential of cultivation as a means of relation. This attitude towards farming migrant communities in Italy reveal a deep insecurity when it comes to “foreigners” working the land, which demonstrates the fragility of defining identity based on the nationalist claim of blood to soil promoted by the fascist regime.36

How can we make agriculture questions territoriality and borders and vis-versa? There needs to be a counter-agronomy to subvert the current mode of production (industrial agriculture and big scale distribution) which inherently requires borders. Therefore, Glissant’s philosophy could be applied to soil in the Italian context, where Italian nationals and migrant farmers should engage in relation by maintaining their opacity (to avoid othering)

Few projects already engage in this matter. Semina is an ongoing project developing migrant food cultures in Italy through cultivation and cooking. The project works with and is led by migrant communities. Seeds from different origins were selected and are being cultivated such as okra, curcuma and daikon, introducing them to the Italian market and tables.37 The network is composed of entrepreneurs, restaurants, urban orchards and more, who all share the urge of thinking of migration and living together differently. This relation happens at the level of seeds rather than borders.

In Puglia, a production and distribution network called Fuori Mercato38 (in Italian translates to “outside of the market”) has been gathering various associations and local producers who’s work foregrounds the care for people and soil. Part of their network includes: Diritti a Sud, a non-profit association that offers legal advice to migrants arriving to Italy and who often find themselves in exploitative work environments.39 As well as SfruttaZero, a company led by Italian nationals and migrants to produce “exploitation-free” tomato products. They practice agro-ecological farming techniques

34 Interview with Leone Contini over zoom, Rome, December 2021.

35 Regine, Future farming. How migrants can help Italian cuisine adjust to climate disruptions, (2020), <https://we-make-money- not-art.com/future-farming-how-migrants-can-help-italian-cuisine-adjustto-climate-disruptions/>

36 Soil is the inscribed body, on sovreinity and agropoetics, Savvy Contemporary: The laboratory of formideas, (31.08.–06.10.2019) <https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/projects/2019/soil-is-an-inscribedbody/>.

37 ‘Il Progetto - Semino - Alimentare Positivo’. [n.d.]. Semino - Alimentare Positivo <https://www.semino.org/il-progetto/> [accessed 18 April 2022]

38 About section of Fuori Mercato: autogestione in movimento, website, <https://www.fuorimercato.com/index.php/118-chi-siamo>

39 Interview with Paola Frascella from Diritti a Sud over zoom, December 2021.

and use a local and traditional tomato seed (non-hybrid), making them independent from seed corporations. Their production is not under the EU biological patent because the requirements were too restrictive and “intensive”. Moreover, the production isn’t big enough to receive subsidies from the EU Common Agricultural Policy (only from 4 hectares and above). These EU policies and subsidies just benefit bigger scale agricultures demonstrating further the interest of profit over soil.40

Nevertheless, these initiatives of worlding, prove that alternative circuits of care are possible. Self-governed productions don’t require borders that hierarchize and define individuals for cheap labour power. Instead, it requires to see beyond extractive relations to people and soil.

Conclusion

The Italian fascist and colonial regime have been at the genesis of constructing national identity through the spatial strategy of infrastructural projects on agriculture. Internal and External colonization projects demonstrated the essentialization and obsession of legitimizing the connection of blood to soil to create a strong nation. Similarly, the contemporary agricultural infrastructure echoes this not-so-distant past, which is now disguised in the logistics of supply chain capitalism.

Our cultures are results of migration processes, exposing the counter-intuitiveness and obvious failure (thinking of the inequalities and violence it promotes) of legal regimes and borders resisting, preventing, and calibrating (to profit) these exchanges. If we then adopt an understand of our contemporary society as a multiplicity of historical influences that cannot be restricted, then the need for a strong nationalistic claim is futile and melancholic of authoritarian regimes. As Glissant exposes in his philosophy, one can and should maintain its opacity while being in relation to avoid extractive and subordinating relationships. The construction of the other and its consequent fear reflects the weakness of identity based on the territoriality of the nation-state.

This identity paradigm can be and should be rejected today because it reveals a continuation of the same violent system of value enacted during colonialism. Belonging and relating to territoriality can go beyond the legal and economic regimes that seem to define people today. Solidarity in the wake of climate change and soil degradation is urgent. More and more people will migrate by consequence of the interaction of political, economic, and environmental pressures41 . Therefore, by subverting and reevaluating our relations to soil we can start re-signifying borders

41 Adrian Lahoud, Floating Bodies, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg, Berlin, (2014)

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