With contributions from Alice Toietta, Caterina Selva, Alessia Romano, Mimmo Nardozza and Giorgio Stefani

Albeit scarcely known to public opinion, the Southern Italian region of Basilicata is a European hub for oil extraction.

Complex interests have stimulated over time poor extraction practices, affecting the environment and residents’ health. For years, local people have complained about environmental contamination and human illnesses. Faced with the inaccessibility or absence of official information, some inhabitants started carrying out ‘civic monitoring’ activities to gather evidence in support of their complaints. We follow these ordinary people in their fight for environmental information. 

The Interactive Maps

In the summer of 2021, we walked slowly crossing lands affected by oil extraction in Southern Italy, precisely in the region of Basilicata, a largely invisible European hub for oil production. Latent forms of contamination often escape mainstream narratives.

Our journey in Basilicata lead to the creation of interactive maps that serve as platforms for story-telling. Maps—especially if realized ‘from below’ through the contribution of local sentinels present on the territories—can be effective tools to depict the complexity of contaminated spaces and understand one’s position, at a geographical and experiential level, in spatial extensions that can be embraced from above. And so maps built using MapBox highlight how we walked in Basilicata and the ethnographic work in Basilicata. 

With each scroll, you can also walk through our journey, encountering at every step resources at key locations and the interviewed sentinel with their voice captured in a video or audio. All the people met became a ‘portrait’ of a humanized puzzle, each with their individual and shared imaginaries visible here thanks to the help of a visual artist that illustrated the sentinels engaged in our study. Most of the interviews contained in the interactive maps and the quotes from the sentinels are in Italian but in the video reportage, you can view highlights from this footage with English subtitles.