Abstract
During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, conceptualisations of sport and physical activity as contested (bio)political domains acquired new layers of meaning. As the country became the pandemic epicentre in Europe and enacted restrictive lockdown measures, already-existing concerns related to the government of “illegitimate” bodies and practices in public spaces extended to the entire population. This chapter interrogates how the body/space/health/security nexus has been experienced, understood and (re)assembled within and beyond this timeframe in Italy. Articulating the different physical, spatial and health domains that public and political debates foregrounded or made inaccessible, we discuss how the pandemic event contributed to exacerbate differential definitions of (life)worth and deservingness in Italy. Through the notion of pandemic atmospheres, we then interrogate what physical cultures (can) emerge from the ruins left by anthropic devastations and the “intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015 [2009]) as a political subjectivity in the late-capitalist world-order.
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Notes
- 1.
The Decree Law did not define what constituted “close proximity”, leaving local authorities the powers to decide on that. This brought to restrictive interpretations of the Decree delimiting the proximity to one’s residence to a distance between 100 and 300 meters.
- 2.
At the start of the pandemic, there were about 600,000 undocumented migrants in Italy, soon to become about 800,000 because of legal restrictions introduced with the 2018 Salvini Security Decree-Law. The number of people experiencing homelessness in 2020 have been estimated between 49,000 and 52,000 (Barbieri, 2020).
- 3.
Moretti (2020) has provided insightful analogies between the systematic search and harassment of individuals as supposed plague-spreaders during the first lockdown with the cosmologies of witchcraft.
- 4.
As posed through the notions of Capitalocene (Moore, 2016) and Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015). Assessing the content of these critiques is beyond the remit of this chapter, but we contend that all these terms in different ways enable us to (re)think ecological relations at the scale of the planetary.
- 5.
We refer here to Bourdieu’s evocative definition of sport as a “relation to the body” (1978, p. 833) and to Silk and Andrews’ formulation of physical culture (2011, p. 6).
- 6.
Todd’s reflections on Sila as climate, life force and atmosphere points to our own lack of knowledge about non-Western ontologies in the specific case of our discussion.
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De Martini Ugolotti, N., Donato, A., Tonelli, L. (2023). Lockdown Cartographies: Active Bodies, Public Spaces and Pandemic Atmospheres in Italy. In: Andrews, D.L., Thorpe, H., Newman, J.I. (eds) Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times . Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14387-8_4
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