Irene Peano (Assistant Researcher, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon) recently completed her long-term visiting professorship at the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST) in Turin, sponsored by the Lab. During her 5-month stay, Irene developed her in-progress monograph, tentatively titled “Made in Italy: Spatial interferences in the agribusiness encampment archipelago”, in dialogue with PhD students in Urban and Regional Development and with members of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, in Turin and remotely.
The book takes cue from the traces disseminated across the landscapes where migrant encampments have been proliferating in the last three decades, exploring the ways in which agrocapitalist projects of labor containment that took shape across the contemporary era, and resistances against them, reverberate – materially, affectively and epistemically – in the present. By means of archival, oral and written historical sources, working through their erasures and grounded in Irene’s 15-year long, ongoing engagement with migrant farm workers’ struggles in Italian agrifood enclaves (particularly in the Apulian Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro), it reconstructs the transition from feudal to capitalist agriculture from the point of view of spaces of containment, understanding today’s encampments as the result of several recursive projects of racialization, mobility containment, labor discipline and land control. These, it argues, relied on specific spatial formations – the penal colony, the camp, the settler colony, with echoes of the plantation and its slave cabins – that, however distinct in abstract terms and planners’ conceptions, displayed significant overlaps, stratifying and merging through time. Very often, “new” projects of spatial containment have been implemented on the ruins of older, failed ones. Hence, the book argues that across the contemporary history of Made-in-Italy capitalist agriculture, the containment of mobility keeps emerging as a central concern: the specter of unruly and unhealthy, autonomous workers’ spaces of inhabitation recurs as the rationale driving (mostly unfeasible) plans to introduce order by means of controlled movement. This is a history of the making of “Made in Italy” agrifood through built and planned matter, countering mainstream discourses where contemporary forms of exploitation and segregation are confined to a timeless present/past and thereby distanced as “backwards” remnants, echoes of practices that are made out to belong to the uncivilized “elsewheres” of capitalist modernity.
In Turin, Irene delivered a seminar within the Beyond Inhabitation Lab spring series, titled “Spatiotemporal interference: Theorizing the materiality of recursion from an archipelago of migrant encampments”, in which she developed the notion of interference as her book’s analytical core. Elaborating on recursive analysis, interference, she argues, takes matter seriously, as it transforms within mutliple, entangled space-times in the constant play of different force fields. Irene also taught a 5-seminar PhD course within the Urban and Regional Development program at DIST, titled “Coloniality and spaces of containment”, which reflected on critical geography and interdisciplinary literature on space, territory, mobility and coloniality, with a particular focus on settler colonialism, carcerality and fugitivity.