[Elisabeth Tauber is associate
professor of socio-cultural anthropology
at the Free University of Bolzano.]



[Johanna Maria Platzgummer,
PhD in Ancient History,
has been working as a museologist at
the Museum of Nature South Tyrol since 2007.]

Museologist Johanna Platzgummer and social anthropologist Elisabeth Tauber present a short video-essay about the state of their current research on the cross-border movements of wolves in the Alpine region and what these border crossers stir up, rather unexpected for a natural phenomenon of this dimension. 

             The video essay, which is a research tool in the making, approaches the interdependence of animals, humans and plants and the role they play in the existence and preservation of these high alpine habitats from an ecofeminist perspective.

             Against the grain of the media and political discourse of the last ten years, in which the wolf is thematized as a predatory figure that endangers public safety and sheep farming, Platzgummer and Tauber situate the wolf at the centre of a broader ecology. Through the interviews and encounters, the landscape doesn’t appear polarized or conflictual, rather, the potential for a balanced co-existence and genuine agonism over resources becomes manifest. Similarly revealed is the predatory attitude of  industrialised agriculture and the tourism machinery, which seeks to conjure a profitable rural image that thrives on precarious working conditions and on products–grain, fodder, seeds–from far-away geographies. The rhetoric of the local, green and sustainable is undone through the lens of the plantationocene.

             The screening was followed by discussion with Emanuele Guidi (artistic director of ar/ge kunst Bolzano) and Roberto Gigliotti (professor for Interior and Exhibit Design at the Faculty of Design and Art of unibz).

             Elisabeth Tauber is associate professor of socio-cultural anthropology at the Free University of Bolzano. She has lived for several years with seminomadic Sinti in northern Italy, researching marriage systems, relationships with the deceased, gift economies and nomadism. More recently, her work with high alpine shepherds has focused on landscape, environment and human-nonhuman relations. She co-coordinates the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology and is a member of the Fragmentary Institute of Comparative Timelines.