Greening the Visual: an Environmental Atlas of Italian Landscapes

Head: Marco Maggioli

Year 2019
Year

Environmental issues and challenges have become the subject of growing interest over the last few decades. Understanding our contemporary attitudes towards nature is of overwhelming importance, not only in connection with the debate about sustainability at large but also because they are embedded in, and responsible for, our everyday practices. If the textual, rhetorical and linguistic construction of nature has been recognized across several disciplines, the investigation of the role of visual media in forging environmental meanings and perceptions deserves to be dealt with in depth. Given the central role of visual media in framing the environment and bringing environmental problems to political attention, the question of how visual representations determine environmental discourse has a crucial importance.
This project is intended to investigate the visual construction of the environmental discourse in Italy, both in a historical perspective and in contemporary visual practices. Specifically, it aims at analyzing the emergence and the features of the environmental discourse behind the visual representation of environmental issues in three different kinds of Italian landscape (sea, city, rural landscapes). The local Unit (WP - Environmental narratives: enterprise cinema and the urban landscape) will deal with the collection, cataloguing and analysis of the cinematic material in an environmental and urban key of the Italian firms outlined during the 1960s and 1970s in a period of paradigmatic change on the environment.

Project Prin. Announcement 2017. Local Unit