Shaped by Power

Abstract

As a piece of larger research which focuses on the relation between the exercise of power over water resources, the contribution examines the current environmental exhaustion of the north-Italian mountain landscape resources exploring the interplay of ecological transformation of the alpine area with the multiplicity of processes of rationalization of the territory. The essay questions the territorial implications of the politics of exploitation of water, focusing on the capitalocene landscapes of the Piave river. Bisecting the region through a valley-section, it describes how its embedded dynamics of production are closely entangled, and consequently dependent upon, the ecologies of specific spaces, often seemingly disconnected or remote. In the current frame of increasingly worsen climate conditions, this contribution attempts to question the socio-political and ecological dynamics that the machinic landscape entails across the territory, would it be urbanised or rural.

Keywords

• resource exhaustion
• climate change
• second-nature