Forts ecologies: an interspecific approach to fortified heritage

‘Landscapes-forts’ is an independent research and curatorial project started in 2019 and aimed at building a new territorial imaginary for the abandoned WWI Austro-Hungarian forts of Trentino-Alto Adige alpine region, linked to a renewed ecological vision. Drawing insights from landscape archeology, built heritage, emotional geography, contemporary philosophy (posthuman, multispecies and interspecific approaches), natural sciences (geology, botany, biochemistry), phenomenology and feminism, the project focuses on the post-war life span of these structures. Our reading promotes interspecific approach to forts heritage that interlink multispecies and landscape as a comprehensive framework, able to rediscover and narrate all those micro-facts and more-than-human beings involved in shaping their environments, contributing to turning them into unconscious ecosystems. From history, the focus shifts to the stories, from heroes to the actors, from leaders to the guests: a ruin is not a process of destruction, but the process of a construction shared between humans and the other species. Establishing a parallel from queer and gender theory, the research challenges the very notion of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, proposing a queer approach to landscape where both dimensions fuse into a single hybrid presence. During their last one hundred years in fact, these abandoned structures became landscape and contributed to shape whole new mountains parts: concrete turns into stone, stalactites and stalagmites spring from underground parts, fungi and moss constitute new layers and everything fuses into a new coexistence. Therefore, these century-old mountain forts could offer the key to imagine spatial and material futures based on radical integration of species, genders, and categories, turning conflict archeologies into traces of welcoming rituals. An untold story which opens up a space for possibilities and alternative assemblages to exist.