Speculative Connectivities: Caring for the Future across the Strait of Messina
Abstract
In the decades-long discourse surrounding the unbuilt “ponte sullo stretto”, the bridge across the strait of Messina, the proponents of the project have emphasized how the mega-infrastructure would connect two economically disadvantaged regions - Sicily and Calabria - and realize a greater one “as if there were no longer a sea dividing them” (Gattuso 2024). This rationale echoes both globally reverberating promises of infrastructure, as well as local hopes and anxieties lodged in the long-standing socio-cultural imaginary of Southern Italy as disconnected from the rest of Italy. In this quest for progress and prestige, connection and recognition, the negative environmental and social impact of the “longest bridge in the world” have repeatedly been obfuscated.
The most recent version of the “ponte sullo stretto” plan has been met with robust resistance: Ever since the unbuilt bridge resurfaced on Italy’s current far-right government’s budget planning agenda, Messina’s feminist collectives - among others - have been flagging it as a transfeminist issue, warning that the plan, if materialized, would result in a domination of the earth and of the gendered bodies living with and lining the strait. Through an ethnographic lens on feminist organizing in resistance to the “ponte’s” most recent plans, this paper asks: In what ways do (feminist) visions of care “burn the bridge” over the strait, and let different, non-authoritarian futures rise in its stead? I put in conversation feminist attention to infrastructure provision as care and as struggle (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) and the cultural-architectural history of Sicily (the “Siciliano Incompiuto”), shedding light on the speculative connectivities that emerge from alternative future imaginaries for the sites that the strait straddles.
The most recent version of the “ponte sullo stretto” plan has been met with robust resistance: Ever since the unbuilt bridge resurfaced on Italy’s current far-right government’s budget planning agenda, Messina’s feminist collectives - among others - have been flagging it as a transfeminist issue, warning that the plan, if materialized, would result in a domination of the earth and of the gendered bodies living with and lining the strait. Through an ethnographic lens on feminist organizing in resistance to the “ponte’s” most recent plans, this paper asks: In what ways do (feminist) visions of care “burn the bridge” over the strait, and let different, non-authoritarian futures rise in its stead? I put in conversation feminist attention to infrastructure provision as care and as struggle (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) and the cultural-architectural history of Sicily (the “Siciliano Incompiuto”), shedding light on the speculative connectivities that emerge from alternative future imaginaries for the sites that the strait straddles.
Date Issued
2025-09-22
Publication Type
Conference Item
Language(s)
en
Access(Rights)
metadata.only