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.