" Hidden in plain sight". Visibility and invisibility of industry in mountain areas. Memory, imagination, heritage
Laboratorio di storia delle Alpi
Half a century after the energy crisis of 1973-1974, which triggered a radical change in the economic model by proclaiming the collapse of the Fordist model, the golden age of industrial modernity seems to have come to an end, eclipsed (and replaced), at least in the West, by the service economy. We are therefore witnessing a transformation, sometimes complex, sometimes profound, whose effects on territories take heterogeneous forms, practices and meanings according to different historical, political, environmental, social and cultural contexts. Among these, mountain realities represent a privileged and unconventional space from which to study the effects of the "end of modernity", as well as the conquests, successes, failures and betrayals of the belief in progress. Narrated, depicted and experienced as 'other', 'rural' (even romantically 'bucolic'), marginal (even isolated), 'extreme' and 'fragile' places, the mountains, when looked at closely, hide in plain sight the signs, traces and wounds typical of the passage of modernity and, perhaps even more so, of industrialisation.
Amidst the ruins of abandoned buildings and the rust of heavy machinery, against the backdrop of mountainous landscapes, are communities forged by industry (mining, manufacturing, metallurgy, iron and steel, and finally, in chronological order, tourism), but remained on the fringes of development models and the new grand tour of contemporary green. Marked by a more or less glorious or controversial past, they live a present of transition (stalled?) towards an (in)certain and, at least apparently, inevitable future (between depopulation and abandonment). A present in which the structure of industrial sentiments, in the case of mountain areas, persists - not without difficulty - in the memory of communities and/or places, as well as in the landscapes that it has helped to "invent" or "build", catalysing or hindering projects and initiatives aimed at commemorating, reconverting and protecting mountain areas in general. On the basis of these hypotheses, the session proposes to analyse the processes of recognition, concealment and censorship of the industrial presence in the Alps, comparing the different languages in which they are expressed. In particular, the session proposes to examine the visual and verbal narratives of the signs of industry in mountain contexts through the triple prism of memory, the imaginaries that underpin the very idea of the mountain, and the patrimonial processes of which mountain industry is the object. How do visual and verbal languages contribute to "hiding" the presence of industry in the mountains? When? For what purposes? What are the discrepancies and differences between the different languages?
Panel organiser: Luigi Lorenzetti, Laboratory of Alpine History, University of Lugano, 6850 Mendrisio (www.labisalp.usi.ch)
Communication proposals with a title and a 1500-word abstract can be sent by 30 September 2024 to luigi.lorenzetti@usi.ch
