CONVOCATORIA ECOLOGISTA
TARANTO

IS ANOTHER WORLD STILL POSSIBLE?

This is the epoch of endless fire. Human destruction is tearing apart the web of life, shredding the network of relationships between organisms and places in which our lives are embedded. Inflammation is a biological, social, economic, and ecological pathway, all of which intersect, and whose contours were made by the modern world. [Rupa Marya, Raj Patel]

The first edition of the CONVOCATORIA opened the way to visions, desires, shared paths, to care, rage, joy and struggles. It expressed a tension towards legitimating knowledge from the margins. From the South and the Mediterranean margins, but also from the transversal ones of other geographies, those of the experiences which occupy our lives and our bodies, creating spaces and frontiers that do not belong to us. The geographies of indifference, exclusion, oppression.

CONVOCATORIA means ‘call’. We would like to renew an ecologist call to Taranto, not aiming to find answers, but rather to ask questions in many other possible ways. We want to think ourselves as community in the differences, even in the gaps, starting from deprived territories, our ones, other ones, from the voices we do not hear, the bodies we do not see, the needs we do not bring forward, the care we are looking for.

Taranto is a marginalized and stigmatized place, which is drained  both materially and symbolically through the narratives of a Power aiming to oppose inalienable needs in order to divide us and exploit us. Ecologism does not divide the struggles, it connects them. This ecologist call is made of many voices, it is a polyphony, a merge of struggles, each one coming with its own vision, but aspiring to a common living, to paths of liberation, for either all or none.

The second edition of the CONVOCATORIA aims to explore this dimension: to deconstruct the narrations of a patriarchal world, modern and unified, to look for new heretical knowledge, rooted in our daily life and in the conditions of our collective living.

We do feel part of the contradiction of a margin both subjected to ontologies of coloniality and belonging to a Global North which is accountable for the processes of racialization and sexualization of Modernity. To decolonize bodies and margins means to us at first to take a situated stance, able to arise from shared, conflictual and conscious practices. Able to look at pathologization as a form of domination, at illness as a healthy response to toxicity. Able to ask which forms of collective care can shake the roots of a socio-ecological crisis made manifest by our dysfunctional biological, affective and social systems. Starting from new alliances and beyond the boundaries set on the margins.