Sharing the vulnerable self

Abstract

The article focuses on Guardia Piemontese/La Gàrdia, an Occitan-speaking town in Calabria (Southern Italy), where the semiotic landscape is constructed through modalities of material historiography revolving around an episode of brutal violence dating back to the sixteenth century. The public documentation of the episode through both verbal signs and other semiotic objects contributes to the everyday construction of vulnerability. This process is underpinned by discourses of resistance articulated in unsanitised language that disrupts passive emotional responses to imagined trauma and facilitates the ethical act of naming wrongs. In the everyday sharing of the local history of suffering, past and present vulnerabilities are intertwined in spatial and embodied narratives that generate new forms of energy directed at building a better future.