Training a lazy eye: peripheral vision in Armino‘s Terracarne (2011) and Rosi‘s Fuocoammare (2016) [Bilingual edition: Spanish – English]

Peripheral Vision in Arminio‘s Terracarne (2011) and Rosi‘s Fuocoammare (2016)

Abstract

This paper focuses on two highly representative works about Southern Italy – Franco Arminio‘s book Terracarne (2011) and Gianfranco Rosi‘s documentary film Fuocoammare (2016). The former is mostly an exploration of abandoned rural villages in Campania and other Southern regions; the latter captures life on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, one of the main access points to Europe for migrants travelling from Northern Africa. Despite dealing with very different subjects, these two works share a series of significant features, including their lack of direct, explicit political engagement; at the same time, both works are characterized by a strong (if less direct) political value, which lies in their attempt to create – as Rancière would put it – ‘new configurations between the visible and the invisible‘. The present article investigates the role of vision and visuality in Arminio‘s and Rosi‘s works, with particular regard to how ‘peripheral vision‘ (Peeren, Stuit and Van Weyenberg, 2016) is used to redefine the very notion of periphery, by undermining commonly held assumption and by adopting a new perspective on the topics of rural depopulation (Terracarne) and migration (Fire at Sea). In the final section of this paper, the new visual paradigms promoted by Rosi and Arminio will be discussed in the light of the ongoing debate on the ‘return of the Real‘ and the end of postmodernism.