lo Squaderno (Jun 2019)
Hydro-idiocy. Bringing the aquatic ‘unthought’ into the dried landscape of Palermo
Abstract
In the Southern city of Palermo, water is not merely confined to the seascape. There is an internal hydrography which has been dried, tamed and erased through the centuries to accommodate the cemental epidermis of the urban. Silently fermenting on the bed of ancient rivers and springs, the recalcitrant “aquacity” irrupts through and against the urban solidity when storms occur. Dwellers’ responses to the flooding are varied and unexpected: they range from a creatively mocking of the urban overflow, where the internal liquidity of the city is performed as it were a maritime one by surfing, fishing, and swimming the urban, to much more violent contestations. In many cases, the “abandoning” of the “Italian citizen” during floods rhetorically complains as the care of the left municipality to another flow: migration. In this ethnographic intervention, I hence discuss the overflow not only as a material phenomenon that disrupts the dried imagery of the contemporary city but also as a bizarre public mood that manifests - during temporal aquacities - through eclectic behaviors and agencies.
