“You can feel the emergency everywhere". Timing and conflicts between technology and care during the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic in Salento

Abstract

The detection of the plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa in Salento (a geographic region located in the southeastern tip of Italy) led to the declaration of a state of phytosanitary emergency since 2015. In this article, the emergency temporality, within which institutions have developed a corresponding research and intervention plan, is critically compared with the emergence of the temporalities of care. Through a collective and transdisciplinary ethnographic fieldwork conducted (and still ongoing) in Salento, the article will highlight how the political, epistemic, relational, and interspecific responses enacted by part of the population represented not only a response to the ecological disaster, but also to the emergency management of the crisis. In particular, we will attempt to interpret the role of technoscience and the importance of care practices towards the soil through María Puig de la Bellacasa’s reflections on care. Interrogating the emergency as a paradigm used by governments to cope with the environmental crises of the Anthropocene, the temporalities of care appear as a horizon of practices to be realized, through which to recompose a synchrony and a temporal correspondence with non-human entities.