Polysemy, emancipation and nostalgia in two processes of politicisation of land in Northern Italy

This article puts into perspective and confronts two field research projects carried out in the northern Italian region of Veneto, highlighting the interweaving of utopian aspirations and structural nostalgia. We analyse the agricultural practices and political discourses involved in the transformation and use of the region, studying the production and reception of associated discursive regimes.In a world linked to small-scale agriculture that is politicised in various ways, the article describes the permeability of political registers and the frequent shifts between progressive-emancipatory and nostalgic-identitarian logics. It examines the reception, re-elaboration and strategic uses of logics linked to the land, understood as polysemic objects (earth-matter; earth-roots; earth-territory; earth-space), in circuits that are intended to be politically distant. The subject of the study is a group of eco-socialist neo-rurals who have settled in the Venice Lagoon, examined first in itself and second through the perspective of its militant network. This is a regional world of eco-socialist activists who have discovered and integrated in the insurgent Chiapas the material and spiritual relationship with the land as an existential horizon. The second group, located in the same area, is made up of a new generation of anti-globalisation peasants with a sovereigntist and independentist outlook for the Venice region, and a self-managing entrepreneurial horizon. Venetian sovereigntists and eco-socialist activists meet both physically and through their discourse. They influence each other––with varying degrees of consciousness––in the name of a common environmental sensitivity, blending languages and political aspirations.