FLOW: Currents of Change in Our River Landscapes

Water, as the main theme for Lila 2024, opened the path to several reflections and implications strictly connected to my ongoing doctoral research, expanding it to an unexpected extent. From the very beginning, informed by Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s theories of matter (1987), I focused on the potential of artistic and writing-based research by considering and including water as an intelligent matter in a broader ecocritical and posthumanist discourse. Inspired by new materialist insights of wider ecologies, I thus argue that the concepts related to a “blank space” in a peculiar landscape – such as the half-frozen surface of the dam in Vuotso – might also take on peculiarities from both cultural and natural forces. Indeed, despite the increasing number of scholars interested in material ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann 2014), the potential of cognitive mapping and ice-related narrations have been so far little examined. The reason for this lack of engagement probably lies in the dynamic and mobile nature of ice as predominant in the representation of the Arctic landscape. The primary challenge in dealing with cultural works involving Arctic issues is that its geography is not uniform: elements like snow and ice, rivers, coastlands, wetlands, and urban spaces, all coexist in this unique and vast ecosystem, to the extent that we shall rather refer to it in plural terms, such as Arctic ‘ecosystems’ and ‘ecologies’. In this sense, creative writing may become an efficient practice to highlight environmental concerns strictly entangled with the peculiarity of the material elements of the Arctic landscapes, with a positive impact in shaping more sustainable (cultural and artistic) approaches.