Finimondi. Multispecies Smarginature
Abstract
The article investigates end-of-world experiences arising from ecological crisis, reframing them through fractures and dissolutions – smarginature – as multispecies phenomena rooted in everyday life. The study asks how the discursive components of modern and contemporary, post- or anti-apocalyptic media milieus can echo the energies of non-human actants long silenced and concealed by eco-capitalist hyperrealism, through the lens of diffractive perceptibilities. Focusing on the 2019 landslide in San Martino Valle Caudina (AV), which resurfaced the buried Caudino torrent, we explore how narrative strategies contribute to shifting the storytelling’s focus of such Italian inland territory from human eschatology to elemental, animal, and machinic agencies. The dynamics of emersion and submersion in the narrative reconstructions of these increasingly frequent climate events resonate with lagoon imaginaries – from J.G. Ballard’s drowned, feverish cities to Pugno’s hybrid, aquatic worlds – as finimondi, revelatory and relational thresholds where connections capable of transforming ending worlds can occur.
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