An Entanglement of Art, Ecology, and Social Struggles: Porto Marghera as Dialectical Image

Marco Baravalle An Entanglement of Art, Ecology, and Social Struggles: Porto Marghera as Dialec;cal Image ABSTRACT Firstly, looking at political ecology, the article develops a critique of the concept of sustainability. It then focuses on the (often overlooked) role of social struggles in the Northeast of Italy in relation to the transition from Fordism to the district economy. From this perspective, the refusal of work is shown not only as a behavior that contributes to the transformation of the production model, but as a phenomenon inextricably linked to the denunciation of the environmental and social unsustainability of factory work. Art has also played a significant role in highlighting the contradictions of the Veneto production model. Spanning the period from 1968 to the present day and narrowing the field of analysis to Venice (in particular Porto Marghera), the article examines a number of case studies located at the intersection between art, social conflict, and the environment. It is not simply a matter of evoking the Fordist past of cities with its accompanying struggles and intersections between aesthetics and politics. Rather, it emphasizes how the interest of contemporary artists and critics in workers' struggles against noxiousness responds to the need to discover an alternative genealogy for Venice's present. These past struggles are summoned as dialectical images to redeem a city reduced to a symbol of extractive policies (first linked to heavy industry, then to touristification), highlighting the presence and relevance of deep-rooted and resistant subjectivities. The Unsustainable Continuity of Industrial and tourist Paradigms in Venice Is it still possible to rely on the concept of sustainability without first criticizing it as an ideologically mobilized concept in and by neoliberal discourse? The great wave of the European climate movement seems to have broken on the rocks of the pandemic and war. European institutions are snubbing green issues and focusing firmly on rearmament. 1 The serial failures of the various COPs, in the absence of millions of young people demanding accountability, are once again no longer making the news. One wonders whether, net of its resilience (another buzzword) in the policy vocabulary, the word sustainability has not now been definitively emptied of meaning. The increasingly dramatic data on global warming and the political choices of the major global powers seem to confirm this latter impression. After all, criticism of the concept is nothing new. In the field of political ecology, almost thirty years ago, John Bellamy Foster problematized the mantra of sustainable development, arguing that nothing would change without a prior critique of the concept of development: Nevertheless, the emphasis throughout remains on sustaining development. In contrast, for those who are concerned primarily with sustaining the earth and creating livable, sustainable communities, rather than with sustaining development or expanding profits, the conflict between economic growth and the environment is much more likely to be emphasized. (Foster, 1996: 130). Can we think of green capitalism as a model of sustainability? Some scholars are skeptical, as it is essentially about making sustainability a new terrain for capital accumulation. As early as 1998, James O'Connor argued: “One scenario is that the destruction of the environment can lead to vast new industries designed to restore it. Imagine lake dredging equipment, forest cleaning machines, land revitalizers, air restorers, acid rain combatants.” (O’Connor, 1998: 27) Even locally, the situation is dramatic. In Venice, the effects on health and the environment of the industrial development of Porto Marghera are well known, especially during the period of rapid growth between the 1920s and the 1970s. Laegambiente writes: The contamination of the environmental matrices was mainly caused by industrial activities and industrial waste, which were used and dumped in the area throughout the last century. In the 1970s, for example, 22,000 tons of toxic waste were disposed of in the sea each year, increasingly further from the coast and finally also on land in a myriad of uncontrolled sites. But the spills continued in the following years. (Legambiente, 2025: 2) 1 In negotiations underway with the European Parliament, Member States have whittled a €10 billion climate fund down to €1.5 billion and aimed it at defense instead.” Paddy Belton, “EU shifts budget priorities from climate to defense as Ukraine takes center stage,” Brussels Signal, February 1, 2024. [1] https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/02/eu-shifts-budget-priorities-from-climate-to-defence-as-ukraine-takescentre-stage/?utm_source=chatgpt.com (Accessed, 28/04/2025) In 1998, Portomarghera was declared a site of national interest (S.I.N.). With this designation, the state identifies large polluted areas that have been declared dangerous. SINs should be subject to urgent remediation, but after almost thirty years, Marghera is still waiting. In terms of health costs, in 2003 there were 248 deaths of Enichem workers linked to exposure to CVM, vinyl chloride monomer, (Pirastu et al., 2003). Also noteworthy is the trial in which Felice Casson (then public prosecutor), on the basis of data collected by former worker Gabriele Bortolozzo, brought a group of Motedison executives to trial, accused of having concealed, despite being aware of them, the harmful effects of CVM on workers' health. In 2001, the court acquitted all the defendants. In subsequent appeals, the verdict was overturned to some extent, but only minor sentences were handed down (Bettin, Dianese, 2002). If we consider the city of Venice, particularly the historic part, the unsustainability of mass tourism is evident when observing two trends These are the depopulation of the city, because of local residents leaving, and the continuous growth of the tourism sector, represented by an increase in the number of day trippers and overnight stays. Some data can easily demonstrate this. In 1951, the historic city of Venice reached its highest number of residents. Almost 174,800 people were living in its six districts. Today, on the one hand, only 30% of that number remain, namely 52,988 inhabitants. On the other hand, the number of tourists from all over the world grows every year (with a trend of +3% of overnight stays in 2017 compared to the previous year. […]. From 2008 to 2018, the number of tourists arriving in the historic city increased from 2,075,000 to 3,156,000. This growth is astounding if we also take into account overnight stays, which have grown from 5,677,000 to 7,862,000. (Bertocchi, Visentin, 2019: 6) In the same article, the authors highlight the key role of social movements in responding to this dramatic situation of overtourism. This is the case of the No Grandi Navi Committee, which since 2012 has transformed the fight against the passage of cruise ships into a battle that “became a sort of synecdoche of the tourism problem's complexity”(Bertocchi, Visentin, 2019: 3). The committee's naval battles, blockades, and demonstrations are an excellent starting point for understanding the role of an aspect that is often overlooked in the classic genealogies not only of the city of Venice but of the entire Northeast model, with important repercussions also on the issue of its environmental and social sustainability. I am referring to the role of social struggles, that of large (or small) factories, but also the biopolitical conflict linked to the various expressions of rejection of the forms of living that culturally and socially characterized the Veneto region during the transition from Fordism to industrial districts. Social struggles, therefore, played an active role in the socio-economic evolution of the territory. Refusal of work. Social Struggles and the formation of the Veneto model Let us start with the removal of conflict in the process of analyzing the Veneto Model. The definition of “industrialization without fractures” (Fuà, 1983) is well known, describing the process of transition from a rural to an industrial dimension in the NEC (Northeast and Center) area. The author argues that the pre-existing characteristics of an agrarian world organized mainly as smallholdings, sharecropping, and land rental would have developed in this area a DNA devoted to self-employment, which would explain the subsequent success of the district model. Fuà highlights some characteristics that shielded this world from the bitter class struggle that had characterized the large Fordist factory. These include the proximity of the workplace to the place of birth, the frequent family ties that characterize working relationships, the possibility of resorting to supplementary jobs in agriculture and commerce, and the short social distance and mobility between the positions of the padroncino (small business owner) and the workforce. A key element in the success of the district economy was the presence of elements such as spirit of initiative, sense of responsibility and a certain anthropological proximity between employers and their workforce. There is also a recurring reference to the work ethic, a real pillar in the identity of the northeastern entrepreneur who inherited it from the pre-existing society build around agriculture and craft (Fuà, 1983). Enzo Rullani and Bruno Anastasia are also among the major contributors to the definition of district economy theory. It would be incorrect to say that they never considered the role of conflict in this story, but they did so from a partial perspective. In a 2011 text, they reject a thesis that unilaterally defines district development as a reaction to the labor struggles of Fordism. This would certainly be a simplistic position, since a socio-economic dynamic of such complexity cannot be explained either as a mere response to social struggles or as the chaotic emanation of a work ethic that contributes to producing a climate of unchallenged social cohesion. In Dove Va il Nordest (Where is the Northeast Going?), published in 2005, Rullani looks at the crisis in the districts (evident well before the global financial collapse of 2008) and argues that, given the molecular nature of this system, it is illusory to think of top-down organizational strategies. Rather, the scholar argues, we need to think about enhancing the organizing forces that the system already possesses, working on the terrain of self-organization. But self-organization was precisely the prerogative of certain autonomous worker groups that marked the conflicts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was in the Marghera petrochemical district that a vast area of worker self-organization took shape during this period, allergic to the guidelines of the traditional trade unions and the Communist Party, which was clearly perceived as an organization distant from the real needs of the workers. It was these areas that viewed with some suffering the imposition of the orders by institutions far removed from the territory. It was these areas that fought against the noxiousness of large-scale industry, adopting behaviors of refusal to work that certainly had to do with the material conditions of exploitation, but also with a culture that rejected the work ethic that paradoxically united the conservative, catholic and property-owning Veneto with socialist orthodoxy. Many of the first instances of outsourcing (the so called imprese system), with various tasks being delegated from large industry to small businesses, took place in order to undermine the demands of the workers. On the other hand, the spatial spread of production and the boom in self-employment also occurred as a result of the workers'rejection of the harsh conditions of wage labor. Starting in the early 1970s, work began to exceed the concentrated spatiality of the factory and spread out in a network across the territory (transforming from wage labor to self-employment). Similarly, workers' struggles crossed the factory gates, creating connections with the social dimension. Struggles such as the self-reduction of utility bills and the occupation of houses were carried out in workingclass neighborhoods, and, together with women, people fought for the recognition of care work. Secondly, economists forget that the conflict in the so-called soft transition did not only affect large factories, but also smaller ones. The magazine Venetica significantly titled a monographic issue dedicated to these struggles, which were certainly peripheral but nonetheless widespread, Rivoluzioni di Paese (Countryside Revolutions). In this context, the bearers of these demands were not limited to factory workers, but included entire communities, groups of women, and educated figures motivated by a pioneering ethical vision of work. By choosing these struggles as a point of observation on the decentralization of production, it loses the denigrating traits of “basement capitalism” (capitalismo da sottoscala) (Rullani, 2021: 10) and takes on those (systematically ignored) of a “small-scale conflict” (Boschiero, Favero, Zazzara, 2010). In general, the greatest limitation of the approach of scholars such as Rullani or Fuà, lies in their ignorance of the contribution to the definition of the Veneto model made by those new, educated and precarious subjects who, from the mid-1970s onwards, challenged the ways of life that characterized the Northeast at the dawn of post-Fordism. The philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, a native of Treviso, the son of a bus driver and a seamstress, moved to the small village of Meduna di Livenza at a very young age. In an interesting biographical text, he starts from his family's working conditions and his own personal political and cultural education to paint a different picture comapred to that of the followers of the soft transition. Lazzarato argues that the social struggles of the 1970s contributed to the Northeast's transition from a Fordist-agricultural economy to a district-based one, whereas official theorists of industrial districts tend to erase this role in order to construct a fictional continuity between tradition and post-Fordism (Lazzarato, 1997). Lazzarato’s position may seem paradoxical, but it is not. In fact, Lazzarato's theoretical matrix can be traced back to Operaismo, a heterodox current of Italian Marxism (developed during the 1960s) that counts among its foundations Tronti's assumption of the so-called primacy of resistance (Tronti, 2019). This assumption subverted orthodox Marxist methodology, which interpreted workers' struggles as a consequence of capitalist development, suggesting instead that it was precisely these struggles, by challenging the status quo, that drove capitalist development forward, forcing the other side to respond through organizational and technological leaps. This “discovery” was based on the great vitality and radicalism of the struggles of the so-called “mass worker” during the 1960s. Lazzarato's discourse must therefore be placed within this genealogy. He does not claim credit for having defined the Veneto model as an effective business model. On the contrary, the author is aware of the defeat of the movements of 1968 and even more so of those of the 1970s (which he had helped to animate), but he nevertheless intends to claim an active role for struggles in the development of capitalist modes of production. The critique of the concept of industrialization without fractures has already been discussed in part, but Lazzarato reconstructs the painful story of the emigration of some of his relatives. In retracing the typical day of his father and mother, a way of life emerges that forced the former to work grueling shifts and the latter to support the family, not only with ordinary care work, but also with extraordinary work as a knitter at home, a commitment that doubled during periods when her husband, a factory worker, was on strike. Moreover, even the theory of seamless industrialization recognizes that the NEC area is characterized by the massive use of so called “half-strength labor” (i.e., given the informality of relationships, the possibility of employing housewives, students, and the elderly) and the overuse of full labor, starting with that of the small business owner who often willingly works beyond normal working hours (Fuà, 1983). But it is at the price of emigration, harsh dynamics of self-exploitation, and permanent, albeit latent, conflict within his family that the young Maurizio gains the opportunity to attend school. The author recounts the path of his politicization through a double track, the first being a generational rejection of his parents' way of life as wage workers. Lazzarato, like many young people from Veneto, attends church and plays soccer. But when, albeit with some delay, rock music begins to spread, the soccer team turns into a band, and it is through this form of expression that counter-imaginaries and counter-conducts are introduced. These began to transform the young man's (and an entire generation's) view of reality, criticizing established values, including that of wage labor. It was a bipartisan critique that spared neither the conservative point of view, that of the Catholic workforce, nor the point of view of the official socialist ideology. Furthermore, as we have seen previously, the struggles of the large Fordist factories had also spread far beyond the factory gates. Although still in its infancy, the sprawling metropolis was not only spreading a certain (still unconscious) way of doing business, but also a conscious way of organizing social conflict. It was always in the shadow of the bell tower, at dusk, that the first generation of educated Veneto proletarians met the young and not-so-young workers returning to the village after their shift. And the parish unintentionally provided fertile ground for an encounter between generations, but above all between two phases of production that were about to exchange their primacy. Many of these workers, especially the younger ones, were conscious interpreters of what was called the “refusal of work”, a strategy that produced a break (as we have seen) both with the employers and with the parties and trade unions that were the guardians of socialist ideology. The point of Lazzarato's text is that this encounter between different worlds and subjects, this singular concatenation with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, was not only completely ignored by the analysis of district theory, but also played a fundamental role in triggering the decentralization of production. The refusal of work, expressed both against the condition of professional exploitation and directly in the social dimension, is therefore at least as useful a tool as the work ethic for an archaeology of the Northeast model. Having clarified the general weight of social struggles and refusal of work in the productiver decentralization of the Northeast, a specific aspect should be emphasized. It was the workers' mobilizations in Porto Marghera that brought to the fore the unsustainability of large-scale industry in Veneto, especially the struggles against harmful working conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not the place to reconstruct in detail the story of the petrochemical workers close to Potere Operaio and then, from 1972, organized in the Assemblea Autonoma di Porto Marghera, but it was these autonomous worker vanguards who organized the struggles against factory pollution. Feltrin and Sacchetto summarize the crux of that season of mobilization as follows Over the 1970s, the quantitative demand for ‘more money, less work’ proposed by early workerism in its strategy of refusal appeared insufficient, because reductions in working hours might spare workers from workplace-based noxiousness but would not necessarily halt environmental degradation. This problem called for a qualitative struggle over ‘what, how, and how much to produce’ to impose a transition to a system based on collective needs, understood as involving a sustainable relationship between humanity and the environment. In other words, it was deemed ‘more valid to change the content of production rather than taking over the productive apparatus’ (CL, January 1980, 1). Such shift was reflected upon in Controlavoro’s second to last issue in the following terms: “The contradiction existing within every one of us between a ‘desire to produce’ and the ‘refusal of work’ pushed us to attempt ‘productive’ experiments that were qualitatively and quantitatively different from the production we endured every day. (Feltrin, Sacchetto, 2021: 831) Art + workers. Assemblage and Intervention in Porto Marghera On February 27, 1973, artist Giovanni Rubino and poet Corrado Costa (soon to become members of the Collettivo autonomo pittori di Porta Ticenese), together with worker Italo Sbrogiò and the Assemblea Autonoma di Porto Marghera (Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera), hoisted a mannequin wearing a gas mask on a wooden crucifix and carried it in procession through the port, planting it in front of the Montedison factory gates. As Jacopo Galimberti recalls The specific trigger for Mortedison was a labor inspection that required Porto Marghera's factory workers to always keep a gas mask within reach. Such a security measure glaringly contradicted the management's attempts to undermine the risks of chlorine and mercury vapour.“ (Galimberti, 2022: 239) In addition to the mannequin, the protesters painted a large sign on the factory wall that read “Mortedison” (morte means death in Italian), a play on words that distorts the real name of the company: Montedison. The action lasted just over an hour. It seems that a local priest, scandalized by the blasphemy of the artifact, called the police, who intervened to clear the demonstration and remove the crucifix. In fact, there is a photograph showing the worker Christ surrounded by riot police in full gear, complete with helmets, shields, and batons. In addition to the action, Rubino had exhibited a series of preparatory drawings at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in an exhibition that had opened the day before the action, on February 26, and which would close the following day for fear of retaliation. The artist also produced a booklet entitled Mortedison. Cos'è nocività (Mortedison. What Is Noxiousness), written with Corrado Costa, Italo Sbrogiò, Dario Paccino, and Ettore Tibaldi. The volume included photographs of the demonstration, texts, and photomontages. Finally, a film of the intervention was included by Enrico Crispolti in the exhibition L'ambiente come sociale (The Environment as Social), a veritable summa of the intertwining of aesthetics and politics during the so called Long Italian 1968 (the period from 1968 to the end of the 1970s), as well as Italy's participation in the 1976 Venice Art Biennale. The story of Mortedison introduces the theme of the role of art in denouncing the noxiousness of Venetian industry and the social unsustainability of its production model, traits that, as evidenced by the story of PFAS pollution 2 and tourist extractivism in Venice and the lagoon, would be updated in the transition to the district economy. What role does art play, then? To answer this question, a brief methodological digression is necessary. In this article, the word art is used as a mobile concept, including under the same definition practices that fall within and disrupt institutional phenomenology. Mortedison is, at the same time, an exhibition by an artist in a Milanese gallery, a demonstration by an autonomous assembly of petrochemical workers against pollution, a publication, and a short documentary presented at the Venice Biennale. What prevails, therefore, is the hybrid phenomenology that Gerald Raunig, referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, defines as “transversal concatenation” (Raunig, 2007) between artistic and revolutionary machines, temporary overlaps, micropolitical attempts at transversal concatenation of art machines and revolutionary machines, in which both overlap, not to incorporate one another, but rather to enter into a concrete exchange relationship for a limited time.” (Raunig, 2007: 18) It is therefore a question of deterritorializing common notions of art and politics in order to create, albeit temporarily, territories of fruitful indistinction, where disciplinary roles and boundaries are implicitly overcome. It is, again thinking of Mortedison, a matter of comings and goings: from the gallery to the square, from the news (the echo of the initiative in local and non-local newspapers) to the exhibition, from the factory to the Biennale, from the margins to the center, from the mainland to the lagoon. Recently, Claire Bishop, looking mainly at the tradition of Latin American militant art of the 1970s, has isolated a specific type of artistic practice that she has defined through the category of ‘intervention’: “I define interventions as self-initiated actions that address the polis through the use of public space, employing an everyday visual language, and harnessing the media to force an issue into public consciousness and spark debate.” (Bishop, 2022: 115) This typology includes, for example, a proto-environmentalist performance by Nicolás García Uriburu. In 1968, during the Venice Biennale, the Argentine artist poured a large quantity of fluorescein into the Grand Canal. This is a non-polluting pigment whose effect is to color the water an intense fluorescent green. And this is exactly what happened to the Grand Canal of the lagoon city during Uriburu's intervention, who repeated the action in various places around the world as a warning against the endemic problem of water pollution. Between 1968 and 1970 alone, he colored the East River in New York, the Seine in Paris, and the Rio de la Plata in Buenos Aires. Now, for the purposes of our article, which focuses on the link between art, social struggles, and sustainability (social and environmental) in Venice, it is important to mention that the same intervention, again in the Lagoon, has recently been repeated by Extinction Rebellion, an international movement fighting for climate justice. On December 9, 2023, fifty-five years after Uriburu, the waters of the Grand Canal, along with other waterways in Milan, Turin, Bologna, and Rome, were dyed green. Through this widespread action, dubbed Acque verdi (Green Waters), Extinction Rebellion activists sought to denounce the failure of COP 28, the UNFCC Conference of the Parties, held that year in Dubai. In any case, an analysis of the press coverage shows that the images of the Grand Canal colored green were the ones that circulated the most. This is due to Venice's status as a global icon, not only as 2 PFAS stands for Perand Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, a large group of human-made chemicals used in industry and consumer products for their water, grease, and heat resistance. In Veneto, massive PFAS contamination, linked to decades of chemical dumping by the Miteni plant in Trissino, polluted groundwater across three provinces. The crisis exposed over 300,000 residents to health risks: See: Mastrantonio, M., Bai, E., Uccelli, R., Cordiano, V., Screpanti, A., & Crosignani, P. (2018). Drinking water contamination from perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): an ecological mortality study in the Veneto Region, Italy. The European Journal of Public Health, 28(1), 180-185. a generic symbol of beauty, but also as a symbol of extractive policies and their effects. In the Fordist era, these effects manifested themselves above all in the polluting impact of Porto Marghera, with the associated harmful consequences that have been discussed. Subsequently, from the 1980s onwards, Venice became an emblematic case of the effects of overtourism, which, as is well known, has caused and continues to cause a progressive depopulation of the historic city. It was above all the No Grandi Navi Committee that produced a crack in the image of Venice as a place at the mercy of tourist extractivism. It did so in over twelve years of struggle, with mobilizations often conducted through performative grammar. Think of practices such as collective dives, naval battles, and water parades led by large carnival puppets. Similarly, the action of Extinction Rebellion, beyond the theme that the organizers intended to convey (the failure of COP 28 to address the global challenges of the climate crisis), found itself highlighting local contradictions, symbolically placing Venice on a double front. On the one hand, the city (like any coastal settlement) is threatened by rising sea levels, which also calls into question the stability of the Mo.S.E. (the system of underwater dams that protects the lagoon from high waters), a technological device designed decades ago without taking into account the effects of global warming on sea levels. 3 On the other hand, the mysterious coloring of the Grand Canal has led the media and citizens to wonder whether this gesture was not a blatant protest against the social unsustainability of an extractive tourism model, responsible for the worsening exodus of the population from the historic city to the mainland. It is worth noting that these complaints and questions were raised by Extinction Rebellion through a reenactment (using the same substance, fluorescein, used by Uriburu) of an artistic performance that took place in the midst of the 1968 protests. In 2011, on the occasion of the 54th Venice Biennale, Marinella Senatore presented a radio drama entitled Estman Radio Drama. The work is divided into four chapters and reconstructs the history of the workers' struggles of the 1960s and 1970s at the Marghera petrochemical plant. It does so through the voices of the protagonists, a group of former workers, some of whom belonged to the same Autonomous Assembly with which Rubino and Costa had collaborated on Mortedison in 1972. The track alternates between excerpts of conversations between the artist and the workers and parts read by a narrator (who, from their diction, appears to be a professional actor). The interviews touch on the themes of factory life, recounted in the first person: the impact of the working environment on young people, the disorientation, the role of women in political organization, the criminal neglect and excessive power of the managers, the beginning of the struggles, the rebellion against the bosses and the harmful working conditions, the importance of study and worker knowledge. The narrator, on the other hand, reads letters from prison written by an unidentified worker to Adriana (his wife, his partner?). We know that he is thirty-six years old and has just spent his second New Year's Eve in Rebibbia prison. We know that he is from Venice, that, even imprisoned, he is mobilizing for many improvements in the lives of prisoners. We know that he misses the Lagoon, the Veneto mountains, his comrades, and his loved ones. In reality, it is a montage of letters from two militants of Potere Operaio and the Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera, arrested during the investigation of April 7, 1979, aimed at dismantling the Autonomia movement (of which Toni Negri was also a member). Although the last words of this letter are words of hope with which the sender bids farewell to the recipient, the voice of the prisoner inevitably brings to mind Gli Invisibili (The invisible), a novel in which Nanni Balestrini, writer and militant of Potere Operaio, describes the prison life of militants in the 1970s and the disorientation of their return to freedom after the traumatic decline of the long Italian 1968. The artist wanted to construct a non-invasive, tense soundscape, as is customary in radio dramas, to contextualize the voices of the workers and the narrator. The soundscape is that of Porto Marghera, where the lapping of the water and the blowing of the wind mix with the noises of the factory, the assembly line, metallic sounds, hammering, and sirens (those of the factories and those of the police). We are not listening to a piece of music, but the factory sounds that open the radio drama bring to mind La Fabbrica illuminata (1967), a composition for soprano and four magnetic tapes, composed by Luigi Nono with lyrics by Giuliano Scabia. La Fabbrica Illuminata was born from an ambient recording of the Italsider factory in Genoa, and the lyrics are taken from workers' statements, for example from union leaflets, as well as from a quote by Cesare Pavese. The aim of the two artists was to denounce the harsh working conditions at the plant. The first verse, in fact, reads They called it the factory of the dead 3 See: Mel, Riccardo A., Luca Carniello, and Luigi D'Alpaos. "How long the Mo.SE barriers will be effective in protecting all urban settlements within the Venice Lagoon? The wind setup constraint." Coastal engineering 168 (2021): 103923. workers exposed to burns to harmful fumes to large masses of molten steel exposure of workers to extremely high temperatures out of eight hours only two are paid to the worker exposure of workers to projected materials human relations to speed up the pace exposure of workers to falls to glaring lights to high voltage current how many MAN-MINUTES to die? (Nono, Scabia, 2010: XXXVI) As the conversation between Marinella Senatore and the former workers of the petrochemical plant focuses on the effects of chemical agents on the workers' bodies, on the diseases and deaths caused by the compounds used in the manufacturing process, the link between La Fabbrica e Illuminata and Estman Radio Drama becomes more evident: both focus on denouncing the noxiousness and unsustainability of factory life. Estman Radio Drama was broadcast by 75 radio stations in Italian. There is also an English version, performed by students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. In the exhibition, Marinella Senatore presented the radio drama in the form of an installation with a minimalist setting: an old factory desk leaning against the wall, a chair and a radio from the same period, four MP3 players on the wall, equipped with headphones, texts, and archival photographs. Porto Marghera and the Venetian mainland were also the backdrop of three experiences combining participatory theater, animation, and dance. Two date back to the 1970s, and one to between 2017 and 2018. Let us mention them. Albeit briefly. In 1974, Giuliano Scabia and his class from the DAMS in Bologna arrived in Mira (a town in the Venetian mainland) with the Gorilla Quadrumano. This was a traveling theater dispositive that was, at the same time, research into peasant theater (teatro di stalla, in English: barn theatre), a performance in the public space, and a tool for engaging in dialogue with local communities to investigate ancient cultural traditions and current social issues. Mira, a small town on the Brenta Riviera, a few kilometers from Porto Marghera and the Venice Lagoon, was undergoing a period of transition at that time. Farmers were becoming factory workers and the traditions of the world of those who worked the land were disappearing, but at the same time, a new class consciousness was emerging in the struggles of the petrochemical industry and Mira Lanza (a local factory). The Gorilla's stay in Mira took the form of an urban parade with floats and puppets (part of the stage design created by the DAMS troupe), meetings with local political representatives (Mira was one of the few municipalities governed by the Communist Party in the deeply Catholic Veneto region), several assemblies, and a performance during the local Festival dell'Unità (the PCI's popular festival format, widespread throughout Italy). The same year, Luca Ronconi, the director of an edition of the Theatre Biennale focused on decentralization, invited three different directors to stage three versions of the Othello in three different venues. One of these, Cassio Governa a Cipro (Cassius rules in Cyprus) , written by Giorgio Manganelli and directed by Gianni Serra, was staged at the Petrolchimico factory. Maurizio Massabò clearly underlines the political stakes of the play Cassio governa a Cipro was a decentralized show, meaning it was staged outside of any space normally used for theatrical performances, or even for any other kind of performance or fiction. The premiere took place in a fully operational factory, the Petrolchimico, with an audience mainly made up of workers, invited by the factory committee and the group responsible for the 150-hour courses 4 , thus within very specific social contexts that played a particular role in the framework of everyone's “right to culture.” It was a difficult culture, in this specific case, commencing with Manganella's text of ‘Othello’, which was part of a civil and political gamble by the entire Biennale. (Massabò, 2006: 64) 4 The so-called 150 hours were one of the achievements of the workers' struggles during the hot autumn of 1969. Through this measure, workers were entitled to 150 paid hours every three years to devote to study, training, or cultural activities. More recently, between 2017 and 2018, to celebrate the centenary of Porto Marghera, choreographer Laura Boato led a performative urban walk involving dancers, singers, musicians, and actors. Working along a 2km stretch of railway inside the industrial area, the performers recalled, with particular attention, the workers' struggles against harmful conditions. The event involved over 100 people. Nostalgia VS Subjectivity. Marghera as a dialectical image Even art, sometimes, looks at factories with nostalgia and complacency. This is the case, for example, with Gian Maria Tosatti's Storia della notte e destino delle comete (History of the Night and Destiny of Comets), Italian participation at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale. For the occasion, the Roman artist purchased machines and furniture from various bankrupt factories and reassembled them in the Tese Delle Vergini (of which the Italian Pavilion occupies a portion totaling 1,800 m2) at the Arsenale, creating a mammoth installation that reproduced the spaces of a factory: offices, workshops, and service rooms. The visit consisted of a journey through this evocative Fordist setting. However, what Tosatti presented was not the Italsider factory in Genoa, nor was it Petrolchimico. On the contrary, it was a generic factory, reconstructed with the indulgence of someone assembling a beautiful ruin. One would be tempted to compare the artist's gaze to that (si parva licet) of Benjamin's Angelus Novus. Perhaps it was the winds of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine that caught Tosatti's wings, pushing him toward the future, with his back turned, offering him the spectacle of a landscape in ruins. The difference is that while Benjamin's angel melancholic gaze is an invitation to revolution, to the radical organization of pessimism (Löwy, 2016), Tosatti’s point of view is simply nostalgic. He aestheticizes the the spectacle of the Fordist ruins, because his sophisticated taste is enough to transfigure the factory into an ethereal, poetic, lyrical, and moving space. An operation that appears Pasolinian, but is actually far removed from the poet originally from Casarsa della Delizia. Pasolini, at least, was nostalgic for the roughness of a certain proletariat, the offspring of a world straddling the countryside and the city that was disappearing. Tosatti's factory, on the other hand, is full of visitors but empty of subjectivity. Fordism becomes a banal dream, the epic, the tragedy of the clash between classes is lost, but so is every testimony, every bodily memory, every singular experience. There is no genealogy, it is genre painting, a taste for ruin, an adherence to the picturesque. A new manifestation of old academicism. This is not the case, however, for those who, both from the point of view of research and art, are revisiting the archives of the workers' struggles in Porto Marghera. The workers' mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s highlighted the issue of noxiousness. This challenge united workers and artists in a peculiar intertwining of politics and aesthetics during the years around the hot autumn. Over the last ten years, various critics and artists have been engaged in a rediscovery of those struggles. The thesis of this article is that this rediscovery is not tinged with nostalgia, but that Marghera flashes today as a dialectical image. The notion of dialectical image was developed, despite in a non-systematic way, by Walter Benjamin in the The Arcades Project (1999), and The Theses on The Philosophy of History (2020). The dialectical image appears when the materialist historian (who is also a revolutionary) catches the fleeting moment when the past (a certain specific moment in the history of the struggles of the oppressed) connects with the present and opens up the possibility for its transformation. As Michael Löwy argues: The concept of dialectics is borrowed here by Benjamin from Hegelo-Marxist phraseology: he is attempting to account for the nature of a ‘saltuary image’ that seeks to achieve the sublation - Aufhebungof the contradictions between past and present, theory and practice (Lowy, 2016: 40) Let’s go back to Porto Marghera. The defeat of those past movements reappear like a flash to reopen a perspective on the city's present, to project it beyond the legacy of decades of extractive policies, beyond past and present harmfulness and unsustainability. In this work of research and reactivation through art, the cliché that the contradiction between work and the environment is irreconcilable also falls. Not that this dialectic is non-existent; on the contrary, it has historically marked various rifts between the trade unions and environmentalist worlds. Yet, art practice, proves this contradiction to be short-sighted. What shines through instead is the pioneering aspect of the struggles against noxiousness, organized above all by Potere Operaio and the Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera during the long Italian 1968. These mobilizations, ahead of their time, many decades before the climate crisis became an issue on the agenda, worked at the intersection of social and environmental unsustainability, highlighting not only the need to safeguard jobs (in fact, they did not adhere to the labor ideology of the official workers' movement), but also the need to transform a mode of production characterized by noxiousness. While the economy of the Northeast was transforming according to the district model, the decline of Porto Marghera left room for the touristification of the historic city, a big business that coincided with a radical depopulation of the island. Those who fight on the front lines of activism, those who pursue artistic or research work, today have to contend not only with industrial decline and the Fordist legacy of a polluted territory, but also with the materiality of the depopulation of the historic city and a sense of collective uprooting: the real price to pay for the uninterrupted cascade of money that the tourism industry pours into the city of Venice. It is difficult to imagine that the current model will ever become sustainable. After all, in the 1960s and 1970s, large petrochemical companies considered their production model to be sustainable for the environment and health; only social struggles called this assumption into question. Never before has there been so much talk of sustainable tourism as there is today, while Venice is becoming depopulated, while there is a refusal to regulate tourist rentals, while the Port is planning new excavations, the construction of large islands of toxic sludge 5 , and the return of large cruise ships to the lagoon. So, looking at the workers' struggles of the past through the lens of art, means rediscovering a rootedness in struggles today, a space for social agency that appears crushed by the combined effects of touristification and security measures that characterize urban policies in this conjuncture, 6 means not settling for “dreams and comets”. It means rediscovering genealogies from the past that open up the conditions for thinking a different present. This is exactly what Giuliano Scabia, reflecting about his work in Mira, suggests, and it seems the perfect quote to close this chapter “It is not a question of recovery, but of research. First and foremost, it is a way of positioning ourselves, of creating our own culture, without delegating it to encyclopaedias or culture producers, to those who already know and come to show us their knowledge. All culture, in all the forms we have described, must first be relived.” (Gruppo di drammaturgia 2 dell’Università di Bologna, Scabia: 198) REFERENCES Benjamin, W. 1999. The arcades project. Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. 2020. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Critical theory and society (pp. 255-263). Routledge. Bertocchi, D., Visentin F. 2019. The overwhelmed city: Physical and social over-capacities of global tourism in Venice. Sustainability 11.24 6937: 1-19. Bettin, G., Dianese, M. 2002. Petrolkiller, Milano: Feltinelli. Bishop, C. 2024. Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. London: Verso Books,. Boschiero, A., Favero, G., Zazzera, G. 2010. Il Nordest prima del Nordest. Venetica. Rivoluzioni di Paese, 21/2010 anno XXIV, Cierre Edizioni, Verona. Fuá, G. 1983. Rural industrialization in later developed countries: the case of northeast and central Italy. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, No. 147: 351-377. Fuà, G., Zacchia, C. (eds.) 1983. Industrializzazione senza fratture. Bologna: Il mulino. Feltrin L., Sacchetto, D. 2021. The work-technology nexus and working-class environmentalism: Workerism versus capitalist noxiousness in Italy’s Long 1968. Theory and society 50 (2021): 815-835. 5 The so-called “Trezze 2” project envisages constructing a new artificial island—an expanded version of the existing Tresse island in front of Porto Marghera—designed to hold dredged materials, industrial sludge and polluted mud. This is part of the plan to bring back the cruise ships to the city, after their ban in 2021. 6 I am referring to the new Italian security law, Decreto Sicurezza (D.L. 4 aprile 2025, n. 44), converted into L. 9 giugno 2025, n. 80. Recently the Italian Supreme Court warned about the decree’s heterogeneous scope and disproportionate sanctions, including criminalizing peaceful protests, violated principles of proportionality, clarity, and equality before the law. Read the full text here: https://www.giurisprudenzapenale.com/wpcontent/uploads/2025/06/Rel.33-2025.pdf