When My Silence is On

Abstract

This multimedia essay is a reflection on the practice of listening, drawing on the Italian ethnographic fieldwork of my doctoral research in the environmental humanities. Over one year, from an autoethnographic standpoint, I investigated the discourses and practices of two families1 in dialogue with their permacultural sites, to embody and narrate ecological and place-based stories around the imaginaries of water, plants, food and waste. Following the principle of multispecies storying, which "rejects the idea that narrative is an anthropocentric 'proper'" (van Dooren and Rose 4), I base my research on the concept of the "storied matter". In this view, material phenomena, like air, food, bodies, "can be 'read' and interpreted as forming narratives" (Iovino and Oppermann 1). Thus, my writing is informed by an interdisciplinary methodology, which intertwines ecocriticism with multispecies and autobiographical ethnography, multimodal storytelling and embodiment.