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EARTH
PATRIZIA FUMAGALLI ROBERTA SECCHI
Patrizia Fumagalli is an expert in deep geological processes and geomaterials. She is a geologist, experimental petrologist, and volcanologist. She is a Full Professor at the University of Milan, Department of Earth Sciences Ardito Desio. She is also the President of the Italian Association of Mineralogy and Petrology. She is the originator of the outreach and creative writing project "The Earth's Stories," in collaboration with a team of geoscientists and artists from various backgrounds, including Roberta Secchi.
Roberta Secchi is an actress and theater pedagogue, specializing in creative writing. After studying Fine Arts, she redirected her energies towards theater. In 1994, she co-founded the La Madrugada Theater in Milan. Since 2000, she has been involved in theater pedagogy with adults and children. She has conducted numerous seminars on physical and vocal training in Italy, Poland, Scotland, South Korea, and Turkey.
"The Earth's Stories" is a project that has developed within the framework of the University of Milan's efforts to enhance scientific knowledge. Its aim is to promote and disseminate Earth Sciences. Geoscientists and artists have collaborated on this project with groups of young people aged 16 and above to lead them in the exploration of an engaging narrative that encourages awareness and knowledge of the planet that hosts us. The Earth narrates the processes that daily alter its appearance and guide its evolution through the voices of those who observe it.
PATRIZIA FUMAGALLI, IN YOUR LECTURES, YOU SAY THAT THE EARTH IS BORN, BREATHES, CHANGES, AND DANCES. IT WOULD SEEM LIKE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT A LIVING BEING. AS A SCIENTIST, WHAT DO YOU WISH TO CONVEY ABOUT GEOLOGICAL DYNAMICS?
What I would like to convey is the idea that our planet is alive, because the Earth on which we live is alive, and it is thanks to its liveliness that we can inhabit it. Everything is interconnected.
Unfortunately, we often hear about the dynamic processes of planet Earth only when we witness catastrophes like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or floods. However, the planet is alive beyond these catastrophes.
Right now, as we are speaking, rocks are forming, magma is developing, and everyday elements like water are participating in a continuous cycle through subduction zones. All of this is happening at this very moment.
Geology and Earth Sciences are often associated with something that is in the past and finished. In reality, Earth Sciences are in a constant state of evolution.
Another concept I would like to convey in relation to the dynamism of the Earth is that we are currently agents of Earth's evolution. In a sense, we are accompanying it in this evolution, for better or worse. Feeling like active participants in this Earth's evolution, which began billions of years ago but is still ongoing, is, in my opinion, fundamental.
Collection of the Department of Earth Sciences "A. Desio," University of Milan
IMAGINATIVE THINKING IS ALSO NECESSARY IN SCIENCE, AS IT ALLOWS FOR INTUITIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS.
HOW DO EARTH SCIENTISTS APPLY THIS TYPE OF THINKING TO THEIR RESEARCH?
In the geosciences, the capacity for imagination is essential because Earth scientists study historical epochs that are very distant and may not even involve the presence of humans.
It is a very ancient history in which the sources are rocks, fossils, landscapes, minerals; they are not written records, stories, or illustrations.
That's why the imagination of a geoscientist must be very vivid. Additionally, geoscientists study inaccessible regions: the interior of the Earth is unreachable. Imagining what the subsurface is like requires a considerable effort and is not as straightforward as studying a phenomenon that occurs on the surface, in which one can actively participate.
ONE OF THE IMMEASURABLE AND CHALLENGING-TO-COMPREHEND CHARACTERISTICS FOR US HUMAN EARTHLINGS IS THAT OF THE EARTH'S TIME DIMENSION. WHAT EXACT TIMEFRAME ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
It's a time of difficult perception, and this has also been a constraint for the development of geology itself.
Until the dispute over the age of the Earth was resolved, geology could not develop freely.
The age of the Earth could only be determined rigorously following the discovery of radioactivity, so we're talking about the 19th century.
Before the great scientific revolution, the age of the Earth was estimated based on sacred books, such as Genesis, to be around 4,000 to 6,000 years.
Using radioactivity, we discovered that the Earth is approximately four and a half billion years old, an age that is difficult for us to perceive in terms of scale.
What is done then is to rescale the age of the Earth to the span of a solar year. If we imagine the birth of the Earth as January 1st and revisit the various moments of Earth's evolutionary history, dinosaurs appear on December 13th, are already extinct by Christmas, and humans appear only on December 31st, with Homo sapiens emerging just a few minutes before midnight.
Collection of the Department of Earth Sciences "A. Desio," University of Milan
PATRIZIA, TELL US ABOUT THE CREATIVE WRITING LAB "I RACCONTI DELLA TERRA.
The idea of combining writing with science arose from the awareness that when a geoscientist studies the Earth, they are reading its stories.
The Earth has a narrating voice of its own history, and we, as writers and interpreters, read it through the geological phenomena and processes of the territory.
The desire to spread Earth Sciences in the community stems from the awareness that we talk about the Earth daily, yet there is little knowledge of our planet. If we ask ordinary people what DNA is, what a virus is, surely some will respond.
If we ask about the interior of the Earth, what is meant by lithosphere, what the Earth's mantle is, it is likely that no one will know how to answer.
That's why, in our meetings, we start from this lack of knowledge.
We oriented the workshop towards young people starting from the age of 16 because the desire was to try to preserve their desire to observe and their curiosity.
When we are younger, we have this emotional drive to want to know, and children are the best observers.
Then this ability is lost because we focus more on notions and mnemonic learning of concepts. The goal was not to block this potential in high school students but rather to keep it alive.
Participants expressed through their writings their surprise at not knowing and a deep sense of intimacy. It's as if by exploring the Earth's interior, you can also explore your own inner self.
It's strange for a scientist to approach this kind of approach. It was surprising to find myself making this analogy: the individual's intimacy as the Earth's interior. This allowed us to experience information related to the planet Earth in a very personal way.
It was truly an exciting journey that we would like to repeat, and in fact, we are now proposing it in schools as part of PCTO (Paths for Transversal Skills and Orientation) for entire classes with the ambition of involving and inspiring teachers as well, as they are our intermediaries.
Collection of the Department of Earth Sciences "A. Desio," University of Milan
ROBERTA SECCHI, TELL US ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE WITHIN THE "I RACCONTI DELLA TERRA" CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP.
Patrizia Fumagalli contacted me thanks to Francesca Rendano from the Mamusca bookstore in Dergano. She knew that I was involved in creative writing, not to train writers, because I am not a writer myself, but because every person can become writing.
To place ourselves within the word. To narrate, tell, express ourselves, bring out our creativity.
With the kids, we worked on personification as a rhetorical figure.
Making fire speak with its natural tendencies, which are different from the element of water or the element of earth.
Making the oceans speak. One participant wrote a text in which the ocean is furious about what is happening to it, another wrote a text about fire in which its contradictory aspect emerges because fire is an element that rises, but as intense heat, it is trapped in the innermost part of the Earth.
Another participant wrote a text about the contrasts between the various layers of the Earth.
We then wrote texts about transformation because it is a sign that the Earth is alive. People were engaged in this game, as if a dialogue had been created with the terrestrial environment, experienced and felt as part of us.
A part of us that has to do with our origins.
We began to relearn how to address the terrestrial elements as a 'You' instead of feeling them as inanimate objects. In a society that has always projected us into the future, under the illusion of progress, and that now no longer knows how to look to the future, returning to the past, to our origins, is a resource we must draw upon.
Technological tools allow us to go much further back in time than we could in the past and enable us to locate ourselves, understand who we are, what we are doing here, and how we can organize ourselves to avoid collapse.
Collection of the Department of Earth Sciences "A. Desio," University of Milan
GEOMITOLOGY AND MYTHOLOGEA, WHAT ARE THEY ABOUT?
Geomythology is an interweaving of disciplines, and the term was coined in 1968 by an American geologist, Dorothy Vitaliano. It involves the study of all mythologies from antiquity that have been created to account for geological events, both those that actually occurred and those that did not.
MitoloGea is a term that I came up with myself. By studying both the literary and scientific aspects, I realized that Gea encompasses everything we tell ourselves about her. These stories are always myths, whether ancient myths or contemporary myths. So, MitoloGea is this Earth that has been constructed in our perception through all the narratives that describe it.
WHAT PERSONAL DISCOVERIES HAVE YOU MADE BY INVESTIGATING THE THEME OF EARTH?
What fascinates me about the Earth is its underground nature.
A place of the dead, but also a place where monstrous or, on the contrary, precious things hide. A place where time seems to stand still because time actually flows more slowly when you go deeper.
It's a repository of fears, projections, and mythologies. An inaccessible place from which we can only recover pieces to reconstruct narratives.
All this underground dimension is similar to the dimension of the unconscious. The unconscious is also not directly accessible; we can shine the light of consciousness on it, but we can only glimpse reflections.
Our unconscious is our past.
Our body and psyche are heirs to an evolution that occurred because the right conditions were created on the planet.
Studying the Earth's interior means studying where we come from.
And then, it's about entering a spatial and temporal dimension that is so vast or so tiny that we are constantly forced to change our scale. And this is a beautiful creative exercise.
In a recent conference, Robert Hazen, an American professor who works on the origins of life, explained how life arises from carbon by describing carbon as a very unstable element, constantly in disequilibrium.
No other element could have played this role because, being the most unstable, in perpetual disequilibrium, it is the most versatile, as it is willing to form alliances with almost anyone to find stability.
And this is already a poetic element suggested by the Earth because it teaches us that life can arise where someone cannot make it alone and therefore needs to collaborate with other elements.
Robert Hazen goes on to say something paradoxical, "In the last 200 years, humanity has shown that it is capable of influencing the climate. Well, so far, we have influenced it in a certain way, by warming it. Now we can show that we are capable of doing it differently, of changing direction because we need to cool it down."
So, in my opinion, the ecological theme works if there is this reasoning, if it prompts us to have a different, creative, and even paradoxical perspective.
Collection of the Department of Earth Sciences "A. Desio," University of Milan
WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH SCIENCES "A. DESIO," UNIVERSITY OF MILAN,
ACCOMPANIED BY PATRIZIA FUMAGALLI
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