Populist Pastoral (In Smoke)

This film—a collaboration between the US/Italian writer Jennifer Scappettone and the Tanzanian filmmaker and photographer Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe — was made in the central Italian landscape of Umbria in September 2019, at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation outside of Umbertide, where they met. The project emerged out of their conversations about how poetry that dwells intentionally in visual and sonic fields might be presented as process as well as artifact, and their discussions of how reading might be exposed as a time-based medium, beyond the intimate space and time of live performance.

Scappettone’s poem was composed out of field observation, salvaged documents, and roadside trash, as a two-sided panorama poem on a leporello, in homage to the poet and painter Etel Adnan. The text was provoked by the far-right Italian populist Matteo Salvini’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to pull off a coup in September of 2019. Morning walks through the fields of an old homeland that had swung rightward after long remaining a holdout of progressive politics revealed that the region’s sunflower fields had largely been replaced by tobacco fields, that the tropicalizing hills harbored a denatured regime of uncontrollable heat, and that the old centri sociali (countercultural “social centers” growing out of squats) of the 1960s through 1990s appeared shuttered under pressure of hateful new social-media (“social”) rhetoric and protracted economic crisis. The roadsides were strewn with cigarette packs and lottery tickets branded with warnings about the health risks implicit in this new pastoral: SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF BLINDNESS; SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF IMPOTENCE; SMOKING KILLS—QUIT IMMEDIATELY; THIS GAME OF CHANCE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH—IT CAN CAUSE PATHOLOGICAL ADDICTION.

Though wary of the pesticides, growth regulators, and fertilizers that would likely have coated this garbage, Scappettone began harvesting it alongside other bits of junk (receipts, cultural tourism ephemera, etc.), incorporating all into the poem as abraded daybook paralleling and crossing the march of headlines. Having watched loved ones suffer up close from the long-term repercussions of smoking and the cruel optimism of petty gambling, Scappettone integrated these aborted messages as sibylline testaments to the cynicism of economies that generate systemic harm, then issue warnings that place responsibility in individual hands. The text was read and recorded while walking together from the Castrabecco farmhouse to the Ranieri Castle on a gravel road uphill in a single take, testing breathlessness. As respiratory crisis began in the months following to storm the globe, the question of who is responsible for the hazards in the air we all ineluctably breathe jumped scales even further, and the complicity of “free” agents in propping up rigged systems of governance and profit seemed to become enmeshed in the atmosphere beyond extrication.

The artists would like to thank the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for having made this collaboration possible.