With Elisa Tullia Bertuzzo, urban ethnographer who experiments with multiple forms of intervention in variegated public spheres, from publishing to exhibiting through curation and activism.

Online | 3:30-5:00 PM (CET) | Registration form will be available in due course.

In the early 2000s, Bangladeshi immigrants started growing vegetables introduced from the native country across Italy. The crops prospered and the demand from Italy's varied migrant communities was so high that some moved to larger-scale production. This launched a cooperation of plans and humans that within a decade, gave shape to Italy’s first generation of independent migrant farmers, to a supply chain now providing consumers in whole Central Europe with a whole new range of fresh “exotic” vegetables at affordable prices, and to "hybrid" rural landscapes. Evolving off the radar, these developments have lacked dedicated study. Rumours of biological “invasion”, attached to the fact that the seeds are introduced from outside the EU, appear to be a main deterrent for research.

Research I have conducted in Italy evidences ill-informed perceptions of risk—for example, crops selected and "domesticated" for hundreds of years are not resistant enough to turn invasive—and a remarkable amnesia for how in the “old continent”, introduced species have improved food security and diets for centuries. During the workshop, "How to Know Migration and Technology Otherwise", I argued that the propensity to embrace the narrative of invasion correlates with fears that crisscross Europe’s discourse on migration, and with the EU's acerbating border regimes and bio-surveillance policies—prescribing, e.g., the coupling of “plants passports” to QR codes for the tracking of (certain) plant species. In the paper I propose for discussion within this Seminar Series, I will elucidate this argument and elaborate on the entangled political and corporate interests that have pushed public investment in border regimes and (bio)surveillance in the past decades. I intend to show how these have not only constructed migration as “out of control”, but also consistently tried to deviate attention from the environmental crises and their major causes, extractivism and capitalism.

The paper is planned for an anthology, edited by Elena Giacomelli and Andrew Baldwin for Bristol University Press, focussing the narratives and visual aesthetics of climate mobilities. As a counterpoint to the manufacturing of state-corporate narratives, in the second part of the paper I will reflect my experiences making the short film MUTABIONTS and presenting it at the 19th Venice Biennale, with special consideration given to the film's lead motivation and challenge. Can we create novel narratives on climate-driven displacement and adaptation focussing hybrid human-plant knowledges? And can this help channel solidarity?