10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17564
In this article I will discuss the potential of using the assemblage thinking in multispecies ethnography, as a method for developing postanthropocentric situated accounts. It is an extremely relevant tool with which to relate to make emerge how space is co-constructed through hybrid associations of human and nonhuman actors, which exceed human intentionality. Reading entanglements through a material-semiotic approach provides interesting analyses of the exploitation of the nonhuman on a global scale, but also offers stories of possible situated multispecies relationships of care. These relations are not universal essences, but situated entanglements in which nonhuman actors play an active role. Relying on STS feminist reflections, focusing on care could have the potential of unveiling less anthropocentric more-than-human relations, showing how being depend on each other.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17564
1
en
Beatrice Del Monte
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
multispecies ethnography
Exploring Multispecies Assemblages in Roman Urban Gardening Initiatives
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
13
Essays
2022-07-07
2023-06-30
2022-07-07
2023-10-26
47-69
TS
Beatrice Del Monte
2022/07/07
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17564
47
Independent researcher
2038-3460
1
multispecies ethnography
en
69
Exploring Multispecies Assemblages in Roman Urban Gardening Initiatives
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17564/16415
13
                                                                              Essay
Exploring Multispecies Assemblages in
Roman Urban Gardening Initiatives

Beatrice Del Monte
Independent researcher


     Abstract: In this article I will discuss the potential of using the assemblage
     thinking in multispecies ethnography, as a method for developing post-
     anthropocentric situated accounts. It is an extremely relevant tool with
     which to relate to make emerge how space is co-constructed through hy-
     brid associations of human and nonhuman actors, which exceed human in-
     tentionality. Reading entanglements through a material-semiotic approach
     provides interesting analyses of the exploitation of the nonhuman on a
     global scale, but also offers stories of possible situated multispecies rela-
     tionships of care. These relations are not universal essences, but situated
     entanglements in which nonhuman actors play an active role. Relying on
     STS feminist reflections, focusing on care could have the potential of unveil-
     ing less anthropocentric more-than-human relations, showing how beings
     depend on each other.

     Keywords: urban gardening; post-anthropocentrism; Ailanthus Altissima;
     Mellifera Bee; multispecies ethnography.

     Submitted: December 31, 2020 – Accepted: February 11, 2022
     Corresponding author: Beatrice Del Monte, Independent Researcher,
     email: beatricedlm@libero.it



1. Introduction

     I start watering and I realize how I fell back again in logocentrism. I still
     feel restless. After several minutes, the only human in the garden, I begin
     to slow down. Finally, the nonhuman presences that cohabit and co-build
     this place are opened to my gaze, to my touch, to my hearing, to my nose.
     In watering, my skirt gets wet, my hands get dirty with soil, which sticks to
     my wet skin, giving a feeling that my body perceives as anything but pleas-
     ant. But that reveals my contact with otherness. Plants have grown tre-
     mendously since the last time I saw them. The plot is teeming with plant

!
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
13 (1) pp. 47-69 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2022
48                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


     life, it is almost impossible to see the soil. It is a whole tangle of plants.
     Watering, I make my way through the chickpea plants. Many green buds
     have begun to form on the ends of their stems. In the ground, which is
     now muddy from the water I poured, thousands of ants move swiftly,
     creeping up my leg, pricking me. Still wet, I scratch my hands. As always,
     I perceive on the skin the physical layer that I am used to consider as the
     physical boundary between my body and the rest of the world, and I con-
     sider how the interaction with nonhumans, like any relationship, needs
     time, practice, attention and knowledge. (Field note, June 2018)1.

    In this article I will discuss the potential of reasoning with and in ma-
terial-semiotic multispecies assemblages2, relaying on an ethnographic re-
search I carried out in a Roman shared urban garden named “Tre Fon-
tane”. In the text, I will present two nonhuman figurations that cross the
garden, the Ailanthus altissima and the mellifera bee. In Haraway’s terms
(1985; 2016), figurations are not just metaphors. They are situated and
embodied entities that can allow questioning anthropocentrism at a mate-
rial and discursive level through multiscalar relational accounts of the
world.




                            Figure 1. Mellifera bee in the
                                garden Tre Fontane.
Del Monte                                                                49

    Humans-plants relationships have been highly disregarded among so-
cial sciences till very recent times. In the last decade though, humans-
plants assemblages started to be investigated, in particular by new materi-
alist (Breda 2017; Mayers 2015), multispecies (Hartigan 2015), and more-
than-human (Barua 2014; Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2005; Hinchliffe et
al. 2006; Pellegrini and Boudry 2014) accounts. In this line, I will proceed
to the analysis of the co-creation of the garden area as vegetal politics3
(Head et al. 2014). On one hand, institutional policies and politics pur-
sued by active citizenship groups “on” the vegetal – i.e. the transfor-
mation and management of green areas – can implement mechanisms of
spatial injustice. On the other hand, the analysis of interactions between
humans, vegetal, and other-than-human actors can demonstrate the non-
human capacity for action and transformation, well outside the bounda-
ries of human intentionality. In this sense, politics is disconnected from
anthropocentrism and logocentrism. It becomes intended as the continu-
ous interaction of different actors (both humans and nonhumans) in a
public forum (Certomà 2016). Rather than focusing on narratives and
universal ideologies, this material-discursive politics is relational, “em-
bodied and embedded” (Braidotti 2013, 51). The interactions that
emerge can be of alliance, indifference or conflict, but they necessarily
question the exceptionalism of the human subject (Head et al. 2014).
    Urban spaces are privileged sites where to study the intertwining be-
tween human and nonhuman actors within a historical perspective, inves-
tigating the nexus of cultural, material and discursive dimensions. Ac-
cording to European thought the city has been extensively conceived as a
human space purified from nature (Rudolf and Taverne 2012), as the tri-
umph of the Man (Franklin 2017). However, contradicting these narra-
tives, other-than-human entities actually continuously cross and trans-
form urban spaces, far behind human intentionality (Certomà 2016). For
these reasons, the city turns out to be an interesting and relevant field of
investigation to try to question the dichotomies between nature and cul-
ture/society, between rural and urban, between territories to be preserved
and those to be exploited through post-anthropocentric accounts.
50                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)




                     Figure 2. Urban garden Tre Fontane.

    Shared urban gardens are a part of a broader range of environmental
citizen-based activities (guerrilla gardening, movements for the right to
access to lands, environmentalist in situ protests, animal sanctuaries) that
take place more and more in everyday life spaces of highly urbanised in-
dustrialised countries (Marres 2012; Schlosberg and Cole 2015). There is
a broad body of literature on urban gardens that recognises them as pub-
lic spaces of social (Mougeot 2005; Ferris et al. 2001) and political
(Certomà 2016; Follmann and Viehoff 2014; McClintock 2014) experi-
mentation, individuating them as examples of “new commons” (Eizen-
berg 2012) that can contrast urban social injustice (Barron 2016). How-
ever, in this body of literature, there are also relevant positions that iden-
tify urban gardening as practices that could enhance the neoliberalisation
of cities (Pudup 2012) and green gentrification (Anguelovski et al. 2018;
Dooling 2009; Holifield et al. 2018). Situating my view within this debate,
I argue that urban gardening initiatives could also be investigated as dif-
ferentiated products of continuous messy interactions, shaped by situated
conflicts and alliances, collectively generated through relational modali-
ties (Tornaghi and Knierbein 2016), and constantly re-defined through
material-discursive practices.
    Aiming at analysing vegetal politics of the multispecies garden assem-
blage through a post-anthropocentric approach, in the next paragraph I
will start by providing some elements of my own positioning within the
stream of STS, posthuman and new materialist feminisms (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; 2016; Breda 2015; Coole
and Frost 2010; Ferrando 2016; Haraway 2008; Oppermann 2016; Tsing
2015). That is, a stream of feminist and post-anthropocentric approaches,
Del Monte                                                                51

which deconstructs and connects gender and species hierarchies, as cul-
turally and politically shaped. The post-anthropocentric posture shared
by this range of feminist approaches will drive my analysis of vegetal poli-
tics in Roman urban gardening. Entering a multispecies assemblage as a
research practice is a descriptive and analytical attempt that seeks to re-
spond to an urgent challenge that arises in the human and social sciences:
to take seriously the role of nonhuman agency, understood as shared and
relational, in the co-construction of the social.
    In the text I will start by providing some theoretical and methodologi-
cal positioning elements, focusing in particular on the difficulties and po-
tentialities of reasoning with and in material-semiotic multispecies assem-
blages. Afterwards I will proceed by briefly outlining the ethnographic
context in which I carried out the research, that is a Roman shared urban
garden named “Tre Fontane garden”. I will then move to present two
nonhuman figurations that cross the garden, the Ailanthus altissima and
the mellifera bee.


2. Theoretical Framework
    STS, posthuman and new materialist feminisms reclaim a central role
of materiality and the nonhuman in co-constructing the world and em-
phasize the importance of accounting for them in social inquiries. They
give emphasis to the material relevance of both bodies4 and the world,
trying to move beyond discursive construction and materiality divisions.
Particularly enlightening for the analysis I will carry out is the notion of
“material-semiotics” proposed by STS feminist scholar Donna Haraway
(in Alaimo and Hekman 2008), which, refusing to separate the two terms,
clearly underlines their deep and continuous co-influences. Following
Haraway’s conceptualisation of material-semiotics, in the analysis I will
attempt to frame nonhuman actors as capable of affecting and co-shaping
our common world both at a material and discursive level. In fact, in this
perspective, nonhumans are not simple objects of knowledge, but actors
actively involved in more-than-human meaning and knowledge produc-
tion processes (Haraway 2016; 1991). That is, “everything or every being
is materially and discursively generated” (Certomà 2016, 82) relationally.
    Because of their interest in materiality and the nonhuman world, and
their wish to decentre the human subject from the core of action and so-
cial investigation, posthuman, STS and new materialist feminisms are also
post-anthropocentric accounts. Post-anthropocentrism in general chal-
lenges the separation between human life (that is “bios”) and animals’
and nonhumans’ life (that is “zoe”) (Braidotti 2013; 2016). In this vision,
life stops being “the exclusive property or the unalienable right of one
species, the human, over all others or of being sacralized as a pre-
established given”, to become a “process, interactive and open-ended”
52                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


(Braidotti 2013, 60). The nature-culture divide is discarded as a ruinous
dualism not only for “nonhuman nature”, imagined as “an inert ground
for the exploit of Man” but also for women, indigenous people, and other
“marked groups” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 4-5). In this sense, the con-
vergence between feminist and post-anthropocentric theories has been
read as a radicalisation of “the very premises of feminist philosophy”
(Dolphjin and Van der Tuin 2012, 25) and of its ethical and political
commitments.
    Agency is therefore disconnected from anthropocentrism, as it does
not necessarily originate from a human intentional subject (Iovino and
Oppermann 2012). It becomes the capacity to relationally affect the co-
constructed world. For these post-anthropocentric approaches, nonhu-
man world is agentic, and its actions affect both human and nonhuman
actors (Alaimo and Hekman 2008) at a material-semiotic level. Nonhu-
man actors can change the ways in which our social world is created, con-
ceptualised and organised, however the fact of taking account of these
dimensions does not mean ending up in a new “physical determinism of
social phenomena” (Passoth et al. 2012, 6). In this perspective, also the
classical sociological conceptions of power are decisively redrawn. Power
is conceptualised as relational, situated, embodied and contingent, and so
are power hierarchies. Power has to be researched and conceived as “rad-
ically empirical […], focusing upon the affects between both human and
nonhuman relational materialities within events, actions and interactions
(assemblages)” (Fox and Alldread 2018, 323), and deploys through mate-
rial and discursive effects (Braidotti 2016). However, power differentials
are not flattened (Braidotti 2013; 2016) and should be investigated and
understood in their immanent and material becoming. Situating myself in
this line, in my multispecies ethnographic research, I investigated agential
power of human and nonhuman actors as immanent, emerging from the
field, but not flattened, and eventually conflictual.


3. Methodology

    Entering a multispecies assemblage as a research practice is a descrip-
tive and analytical attempt that seeks to respond to an urgent challenge
that arises in the human and social sciences: to take seriously the role of
nonhuman agency, understood as shared and relational, in the co-
construction of the social. This approach also aims to create transfor-
mation on an ethical-political level. In fact, describing and understanding
the world through post-anthropocentric situated accounts, also means
contributing on a daily basis to build possible alternatives through the
relationships we make.
    Feminist STS and new materialism therefore challenge the idea that
structures and scales are given (Blok and Jensen 2019; Haraway 2016;
Del Monte                                                                 53

Tsing 2012; 2015), seeing them as emergent effects of heterogeneous in-
teractions between human and nonhuman actors. The main limits of such
an approach are the risk of flattening diversities and the difficulty of in-
cluding nonhuman actors in the picture while avoiding determinism (Fer-
rando 2016). However, the desire to study multispecies assemblages re-
quires modes of knowledge attentive to their emergent, heterogeneous
and contingent gathering. This is the main challenge and contribution of
using multispecies, non-universalistic ethnography as a method (Tsing
2012).
    My fieldwork in the garden has been carried out between September
2017 and September 2019. While experimenting with multispecies eth-
nography, I followed the everyday life of human and nonhuman encoun-
ters in the garden, considering that unexpected assemblages that could
challenge historicised hierarchies can always emerge. I decided to per-
form multispecies ethnography with a focus on material practices in the
everyday life because it is particularly revealing in understanding space
production and power dynamics between human and nonhuman actors.
Moreover, participant observation allowed me to trace how more-than-
human agencies, relations and affects co-shape multispecies assemblages.
Throughout the research process, I have always explained my role as a
researcher to the people I interacted with, actively participating in the Tre
Fontane garden activities, on which I focused the main part of the eth-
nography. My involvement in the field, including material participation
(cultivating, participating in initiatives, debates, and moments of space
modification) throughout the research process, allowed me to experiment
and learn by doing and being with, through what has been defined ob-
serving participation (Bastien 2017), emphasising the continuous inter-
connection of the researcher with the research assemblage (Fox and
Alldred 2015).

   3.1 Multispecies Ethnography

   Multispecies ethnography is a research practice largely influenced by
the Harawayan conceptualization of multispecies encounters (Haraway
2008; 2015) understood as meetings between fluid, relational bodies, in
becoming. In this line, the role of human and nonhuman actors co-
construct the world as a continuous flowing hybrid assemblage (Kirksey
and Helmreich 2010; Tsing 2015). This is a post-anthropocentric gaze
that decentre agency from logocentrism (Certomà 2016; Oppermann
2017), focusing on material-discursive practices as embodied processes.
The purpose of this form of ethnography “is not to represent nonhumans
by speaking for them, but to tell stories of them to enable others to dis-
cover [the political agency of nonhuman actors in world-making process-
es]” (Pitt 2015, 52). I conducted my fieldwork accordingly, by practicing
participant observation, learning with and being in the entanglement of
54                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


human and nonhuman actors (Moore and Kosut 2013a). Being shaped
myself by a humanist and logocentric background, during the first
months on the field I struggled with learning how to reveal the presence
of the nonhuman as significant (Hartigan 2015; 2017). Hence, at the be-
ginning of my field research I decided to let myself be guided in the inter-
action with the nonhumans by some garden activists who had been prac-
ticing cultivation in the area for a few years and by an activist who is in
charge of managing some hives in the “Tre Fontane” garden. After a few
months, I learned through their mediation how to interact and read the
entanglements with the nonhuman actors who co-build and cross the
garden, which initially were almost invisible to me. Moreover, I had to
constantly resist the risk of identifying nonhuman situated actors as uni-
versal representatives of the species in which they are categorized by the
scientific taxonomic system. “Species are generally just specimens”
(Bowker 2000, in Hinchliffe et al. 2005) and not universal essences.
    Fundamental in learning how to decentralize my anthropocentric gaze
was to start cultivating myself a piece of land within the garden, which I
did from March 2018. This allowed me to experience the interaction with
the nonhuman with a daily and material approach, learning to read agen-
cy no longer as an exclusive prerogative of the human, but as a wide-
spread and relational mechanism. This approach, which includes material
participation, allows the production of a situated knowledge based on a
high level of involvement of the researcher in the studied assemblage.
This implies that the result of the study is not a universal crystallised un-
derstanding of the experiences studied, but a relational, embodied and
transformative knowledge. More specifically, I have been following the
activities (from 2 to 4 times a week), conversations and daily interactions
carried out inside the garden, following materiality of both human and
nonhuman actors (mainly insects and plants). I took part in the activities
of the greenhouse, in beekeeping, harvesting and in weeding groups in
the garden on a weekly basis. I attended around 20 assemblies, meetings
and public events taking place during the period of my fieldwork. I also
carried out 18 semi-structured interviews with gardeners, collected 13 ar-
ticles from local newspapers focusing on green spaces management and
nonhuman actors appearing in the city, from April 2018 to September
2020. I also analysed official documents and regulations produced by
public institutions in charge of the management of green spaces, such as
the urban gardening regulation approved in 20155, the urban green spac-
es regulation draft (that has been definitively approved in April 2021) and
the Planning Activities for the Coordination of Urban Decorum regula-
tion approved by the municipality in 20186. Between 2017 and 2019 I also
conducted three interviews to the person in charge of the office for urban
gardens of the Roman Municipality (the “Ufficio Orti Urbani”), one in-
terview to one of the members of the Municipal Environmental Commis-
Del Monte                                                                       55

sion, one interview with a person from the Municipal Gardening Service
(the “Servizio Giardini”).

   3.2 Translating the Research-Assemblage through the Writ-
ing Process

    “Feminism loves another science: the sciences and politics of interpre-
tation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood” (Haraway 1991,
95). Positioning myself into the framework of feminist knowledge-
practice, I experienced the process of doing ethnography and writing
field notes as an interpretative translation path, which rejected objectiviz-
ing authority and reductionist universality, in favour of the production of
a partial and situated knowledge (Haraway 1991). Translation is a process
capable of tracing the connections, situated associations, in which the re-
searcher also assembles. As detailed in an interview with the anthropolo-
gist Tsing (Lassila 2017):

   Translation can be a technology of colonial rule; it can impose power […].
   At the same time, translation can create room for manoeuvre as new
   meanings and materials are brought into hegemonic formations. (…) It’s
   also what makes “friction” possible. Messiness gets inside articulations,
   which work through their equivocations. New identities and trajectories
   are formed in the process, for better or worse.

    This article is therefore an excerpt of an emerging translation process,
which involved my activity with the materiality of human and nonhuman
bodies in the garden and institutional actors, the discursive dimensions
materialized in the interviews, in public documents, in local newspapers
and regulations, that is a multispecies, material-discursive, open-ended
assemblage.


4. Rome as a Multispecies City

    The city of Rome has experienced a withdrawal by of the public ad-
ministration in the management of green spaces, due to massive cuts to
public funds and to a progressive decrease in the number of operative
staff. This has been a particularly evident trend in the last decade, even
though it could already be observed at least from the second part of the
nineties7. Because of this lack of management of greenery, combined with
other environmental issues (such as for example the increased blurring
between urban space and countryside, the lack of trees and weeds cut-
tery, the lack in trash collection systems) the city is more and more
crossed by plants and nonhuman animals, also by those traditionally cate-
gorized as wild and spontaneous. In the period of my field-study (2017-
56                                                           Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


2019) there were many cases of findings of wild boars and foxes reported
by local newspapers, which today frequently reach the city centre, while
in the past were mainly present in large parks and in the countryside.
Plant species are increasingly present in the interstices of urban spaces,
multiplying as a result of the reduced maintenance of trees, gardens, and
flowerbeds by public institutions.
    At the same time, there has been a strong increase in the willingness of
citizens-based groups to participate in the management of public green
areas, in part, as noted in the interviews I conducted, precisely to com-
pensate the lack of management by the public administration. Self-
managed shared urban gardens are a clear example of this tendency, be-
ginning to spread in 2009 (Attili 2013) and reaching about one hundred
cases at present (Lupia et al. 2014; 2016; Marzi 2018). The website “Zap-
pata Romana”8 (Roman Hoeing) published a map of the city where par-
ticipatory experiences in the management of green areas are reported.
The map currently (April 2021) indicates 155 green areas, 58 of which are
dedicated to communal gardens, 30 are “spot” gardens (that is, flower-
beds and guerrilla gardening initiatives) and 66 are shared gardens.
“Zappata Romana” is a project of the studio UAP (Urbanism, Architec-
ture and Landscape) and being an on-going project the data provided has
to be taken with caution but it still illustrates the vitality and the interest
that urban agriculture arouses. It is a universe of more or less structured
and extremely diverse contexts, ranging from informal groups that per-
form symbolic actions of guerrilla gardening, to neighbourhood commit-
tees that manage flowerbeds, small green areas or small parks9. The city is
therefore experiencing unusual circumstances, which can, however, also
open up to the possibility to fascinatingly investigate human and nonhu-
man shared agencies, conflicts and alliances in the urban spaces, and to
envision more just ways of cohabiting in the city with the nonhuman
world.




                         Figure 3. Tre Fontane garden.
Del Monte                                                                 57

   4.1 The Urban Garden “Tre Fontane”

    The urban garden “Tre Fontane” was created in 2012 as a shared gar-
dening experience in the southern periphery of Rome, in the VIII Munic-
ipality, on an area previously used as an illegal dump. The garden is locat-
ed within a public urban park, the “Tre Fontane” Park, it covers an area
of 2.5 hectares and is managed by a local association of citizens. After a
short period of squatting of the area by these citizens, it was allotted to
them from the local Municipality. The association that manages the space
currently has about 180 members. The garden activists created a self-
regulation, which sets out rules for the methods of cultivation and man-
agement of the area. In order to obtain the possibility of cultivating a plot
of land, it is necessary to become a member of the association. The en-
rolment must be renewed every year on a voluntary base, through a pay-
ment of 10 euros. To maintain the allotment of a plot, it is necessary to
also be proactive in the management of common spaces dedicated to
conviviality. Otherwise, the association assembly can decide to revoke the
allotment the following year. The garden space, not surrounded by any
fence, and therefore potentially always accessible, is divided into 150
plots cultivated by groups of 2-5 people each, a common area with fruit
trees, tables and gazebos where parties and public initiatives are held, a
school garden, a greenhouse and two beekeeping areas. In the garden
there are sixteen beehives, located on two hills at the edge of the area,
eight on each of the two hills.
   !
   !
5. Following Associations in the Garden Assemblage
    Through the use of multispecies assemblage thinking, I will now pre-
sent two nonhuman figurations (Haraway 1985, 2016) that I encountered
in the garden assemblage: the mellifera bee and the Ailanthus altissima.

   5.1 Alien Invasive Plants as Post-anthropocentric Figurations

    Within the Eurocentric systems, plants represent otherness par excel-
lence (Breda 2017). In particular, invasive alien plants are categorized by
prevailing scientific taxonomies, institutional policies and media narra-
tives as disturbing bodies, as enemies of the natives, to be removed from
public spaces. The representations and policies of contrasting invasive
species are based on a conception of nature in balance, and frequently
mobilize contrasting metaphors taken from the military, xenophobic, na-
tionalist field, so far as to speak of “biological invasions” (Kull et al.
2012). By investigating the symbolic and discursive dimensions clustered
around these plants, many studies have opened controversies within bio-
logical invasion studies (Atchison and Head 2013; Frawley and
58                                                             Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


McCalman 2014; Kull and Pamard et al. 2012). The metaphors referring
to these plants, metaphors used not only by public institutions, and by
newspapers, but also frequently in vernacular and botanical language, are
still often clearly anthropocentric. This is the case of terms such as “inva-
sive” and “pest”, to be eradicated, to be evicted. These are terms used to
refer not only to alien plants, but also to those native plants that freely
spread beyond the aesthetic and spatial boundaries imposed by humans’
canons and intentionality (Kull and Tassin 2012). It is a categorization
that conceives the nonhuman and nature as in a static condition, in equi-
librium, a categorization now powerfully contested by postmodern ecolo-
gy, which has instead shown how unstable ecosystems are, in chaotic
transformation, composed of actors in flux. Yet, plants are never out of
place (Head et al. 2015). They emerge where they find favourable condi-
tions. If they manage to pop up and survive, it means that they are
adapted to the new environment that welcomed them (Head et al. 2014).
     Many of these plants were brought to and from colonized and sub-
jected territories in the colonial empires Era, to be exhibited in the botan-
ical gardens, in the large avenues of the cities, in the villas. Still, exhibited
as exoticised and objectified bodies, they have spread to the new territo-
ries assembling in the arrival ecosystems and showing their agency behind
human purposes, so much so as to be called “escaped plants” (Kowarik
2005; Ronse 2011). Moreover, these plants have been currently blacklist-
ed (that is, they should not be planted and the eradication of them is
highly incentivised) by the European Commission, or opposed within EU
funded environmental projects, as primary enemies of local and native
biodiversity. Examples are Ailanthus altissima, Robinia pseudoacacia
(Black Locust), Rugosa rose, Ambrosia artemisifolia, Fallopia japonica10.
     !
     5.2 The Symposium Tree
!
    Among the plants that the scientific taxonomies categorize as invasive
and that are present in the garden “Tre Fontane”, the occurrence of Ai-
lanthus altissima is a very interesting figuration. The Ailanthus altissima is
also known as the Paradise Tree, as it is named in its lands of origin. Na-
tive from China and the Moluccas and widespread throughout eastern
Asia, it was introduced in the United States in the eighteenth century, in
Europe in 1571 and in Italy in 1760, as an ornamental plant and for culti-
vation. Its cultivation spread to favour the breeding of the Ailanthus silk-
worm, to replace the silk moth. Later the plant adapted very well in the
new territories. It is a fast-growing species that easily adapts to the cold,
to water scarcity, to pollution and to all types of soil (Patrick 2014). Pre-
cisely for these reasons, it grows very well in urban, ruderal spaces, and in
areas of industrial archaeology. Ailanthus plants were initially widely used
as ornamental plants, especially as trees, in avenues and in urban parks,
and also to cover soils and rocky slopes, thanks to their great adaptability,
Del Monte                                                                 59

their superficial root system and their ability to spread numerous lateral
shoots (Maxia and Maxia 2003).
   !




                       Figure 4. The Symposium Tree.

    I learnt that Ailanthus altissima is categorized as invasive only in July
2019. In fact, I attended a course for garden organizers in the city of
Rome, and one of the lessons was held in the “Tre Fontane” garden. Dur-
ing the lesson we were asked to walk around and collect ideas to improve
the state of the garden. After an hour of work divided into groups, we
gathered under a large tree in the common area, as proposed by the per-
son of the “Tre Fontane” association who was facilitating the lesson that
day. Once there, we shared impressions about possible improvements to
be made. I was struck by the suggestion of a young man and a young
woman, a botanist and a landscape architect, who proposed to work to
greatly reduce the presence of Ailanthus altissima, precisely because of its
infesting “essence”. I thus discovered that the large tree around which we
were gathered, called by the “Tre Fontane” gardeners the Ailanthus altis-
sima “symposium tree” (precisely because, several months before, they
took the habit of gathering around this tree for meetings, assemblies or
during public initiatives), is categorized by the scientific paradigm as
“pest” and “invasive”. Yet, in the “Tre Fontane” garden something un-
expected happened. This tree has managed to grow so much, assembling
with the other actors in the garden, that it is no longer recognized as an
invasive and stigmatized species. Instead, it is considered by gardeners as
an actor that is part of the garden, so much so that, in fact, when the two
attendees addressed the suggestion of eliminating the Ailanthus to Fran-
cesco (the person of the association who was facilitating the lesson) he
was visibly annoyed, and did not accept the recommendation. Even if
60                                                              Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


aware of scientific categorisations of Ailanthus as invasive, gardeners de-
cided to not eradicate it, as they recognise the tree as a member of the
garden. This happening shows how these categories are not neutral, im-
mutable essences of the actors to which they refer, but a political product,
a hybrid product of the interaction between culture, matter, and power
(Dalla Bernardina 2000, 2004; Kull and Tassin 2012).
    Moreover, the Ailanthus plant is extremely well liked by a nonhuman
actor that crosses and co-builds the garden: the mellifera bee. In fact, bees
are highly attracted by the strong odour of Ailanthus flowers, especially
within urban environments (Aldrich et al. 2008). Inside the “Tre Fon-
tane” garden, as mentioned above, there are two areas for beekeeping.
Claudio, the person who coordinates the beekeeping project, in 2018 ana-
lysed the honey produced by the bees housed in the garden hives. The
botanical analysis revealed a strong presence of Ailanthus flowers. Below
I will briefly present the relationship between humans and bees in the
garden. The description of this relationship will help to highlight the mul-
tiplicity of human and nonhuman actors who cross the garden. I will then
devote the next section to an analysis of the interaction between the dif-
ferent actors in the field through a post-anthropocentric material-
discursive lens.

     5.3 Human-bee Assemblages
!
     The area of the beehives is placed on a rise at the edge of the garden and
     is marked by a sign with the words “continuous buzz” (“ronza continua”
     in Italian). The hives are in wood and laminated metal, they are eight,
     painted in alternating blue and yellow. Following Claudio [a middle age
     man, which is the coordinator of the garden beekeeping group] I lean on
     a large wooden bench at the foot of the hill, and Claudio hands me pro-
     tective clothing. Then he explains me step by step what kind of work we
     are going to do. He explains that the bees present here belong to the most
     common species in Italy, which is currently one of the species of nonhu-
     man animals at highest risk of extinction.
Del Monte                                                                           61




                        Figure 5. Beehives in the garden.

   This is due to environmental transformations for which human beings are
   mainly responsible. In the Italian context, the bee mellifera ligustica, the
   most widespread in the peninsula, is currently at risk of extinction due to
   the erosion of its habitat and to the spread of a parasite, named varroa de-
   structor, which started to circulate in Italy from the 1980s, decimating in a
   few years the population of wild bees. This parasite is endemic in Asia,
   where local bees (apis cerana) have developed over time a relationship of
   equilibrium with their host parasite. However, in the 20th century the par-
   asite came into contact with the European bee, following its worldwide
   marketing for honey production, causing its rapid decimation. In fact, the
   European bee had no time to adapt to the parasite. While Claudio is de-
   scribing this historical process, I reflect upon how it clearly shows the en-
   vironmental violence of capitalist human action. Being aware of the in-
   creasingly precarious situation of Italian bees, Claudio proposed starting a
   beekeeping area in the garden, taking responsibility for a species that has
   historically been highly endangered by capitalist human action. He ex-
   plains that some beekeepers treat bees with chemicals to preserve them
   from the parasites. He is against it, and besides, the use of chemicals in the
   garden is forbidden. Instead, he treats bees with a mixture of water and
   thymol, which he sprinkles on them inside the hives. Then the bees, rub-
   bing on each other spread the mixture to the whole hive.
   After wearing the upper part of the protection, made of heavy and rough
   cloth, white, and surmounted by a hood with a metal net at the eye level,
   we head uphill towards the hives, through an earthy path that crosses a
   hill covered with “spontaneous” herbs. We carry with us a sack containing
   the solution, a syringe, and a metal tool with a spout, similar to a watering
   can. At the top, next to the hives, we climb over the wooden fence that
   borders the area and wear the hood, with the protective grid that falls be-
   fore my eyes and blurs my view. The hives are numbered from 1 to 8.
62                                                               Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


     Claudio opens the first apiary. At first glance it seems that around the
     hives everything is still. Then I try to calm down and begin to notice that
     there are many bees that fly around the hives buzzing, concentrating
     mainly at the front (Field note, December 2017).
!




                          Figure 6. Beehives in the garden.

    I propose that the relation between bees and “Tre Fontane” gardeners
can be read as a material-discursive situated alliance. As explained to me
by Claudio, who coordinates the project, initially, many gardeners had
disliked the idea of implanting beehives. They were afraid of bees, be-
cause of their capacity to sting. Actually, after a few years, the project is
now very well liked in the garden, and the prejudice against bees has been
overcome. Gardeners have started to interact with bees on a daily basis
and to even modify the garden in less anthropocentric ways. That is for
instance, as I noticed during my fieldwork, they appreciate the presence
of the Symposium Tree of Ailanthus, also because they have noticed that
this plant is particularly appealing to bees. Several of the gardeners now
recognize the indispensable value of pollination done by bees, whom they
know being at risk of extinction and that have contributed greatly to the
garden space improving the quality of vegetable products through polli-
nation. However, while building this alliance, the gardeners enter in con-
flict with the varroa parasite. I suggest that, due to the close, inextricable,
connection between human-plants-bees’ lives, this relation can be read as
a capitalism-varroa-humans-plants-bees multispecies assemblage. My aim
is not to provide any universal account, but to relationally translate a part
of the story, as experienced in my relation with “Tre Fontane” gardeners
and other nonhuman actors of the garden, who affect and are affected in
this multiscalar and situated assemblage.
    Reading the environmental history that led to the spread of varroa
(Moore and Kosut 2013b), following the gaze of Claudio, it is clear how
much the capitalist model of exploitation of other species has acted,
threatening not only the lives of bees but also those of the human species
itself. In fact, situated assemblages are inserted in multiscalar capitalist
relations, but could become “interesting sites for watching how political
economy works” not only for humans (Tsing 2015, 23), and to co-
Del Monte                                                                63

construct material situated alternatives. Nowadays, according to the per-
spective of the group that manages the hives of “Tre Fontane” garden
(but also of people from other groups that deal with beekeeping in the
city, which I have met during the research) bees could no longer survive
without human co-action, which, through response-abilities (Haraway
2015), that is through the possibility of being able to engage in mutual
responses, creates safer spaces with them. Similarly, humans cannot po-
tentially survive without the collateral pollination carried out by bees.
That is, survival always involves others (Tsing 2015). So then, in the gar-
den, a fragile but powerful multispecies assemblage emerges around the
bee mellifera figuration, through the interaction of different actors, hu-
mans and nonhumans. These actors are strictly entangled by continuously
creating and re-creating the space, in an indissoluble hybrid that comes to
life.

   5.4 The Agential Power of Nonhuman Figurations

    A material-semiotic analysis shows that interaction between different
actors builds an entanglement that continuously modifies the materiality
of the garden and the embodied representations that gardeners mobilize
around the ailanthus and honey bee figurations. The plant of Ailanthus
altissima, gives us the opportunity to think how invasive plants could in-
stead be conceptualized and supported within contemporary urban land-
scapes as witnesses – of European colonialism and environmental injus-
tice perpetrated from colonial history to today (Di Chiro 2007). These are
actors with whom to fruitfully reflect on the bio-colonial past in which
the eco-social and climatic crisis we are going through has its roots (Ritvo
2018). As this Ailanthus plant has demonstrated, hierarchies are the result
of relational processes, not ontological substantial statuses (Muller 2015).
The tree challenges the dichotomic categorization of the scientific system
that would categorize it as a bad invasive plant, to be eliminated. It be-
comes instead the symbolic centre of the common space for the members
of the “Tre Fontane” association. It is precisely the materialisation and
continual modification of the space of the garden put in place by this
plant, which configures it as a social actor that contests an anthropocen-
tric normative order. Its presence and capacity to co-transform and co-
habit the space of the garden, which exceeds human intentionality, clearly
question an anthropocentric conceptualisation of urban spaces and allow
us to experiment multispecies collective modes of existence within trou-
bled landscapes.
64                                                             Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


6. Conclusions
    With this article my aim was to show the analytical and material pow-
er of multispecies assemblages. That is, post-anthropocentric political
practices and lens of analysis that allow to creep in the folds of reality,
giving emphasis throughout the whole research and analysis process on
actors who risked otherwise being made invisible by the use of a fully
humanist and anthropocentric gaze. By learning to use a situated gaze
that deconstructs the concept of the human as a politically determined
power device, the relevance of the nonhuman in the city becomes explic-
it.
    Relying on the multispecies investigations that I have conducted so
far, I advocate that, in the immediate future, further research on how a
post-anthropocentric city can be imagined and materialized would be rel-
evant. By this term I mean a city co-built and crossable by all those hu-
man and nonhuman bodies, who do not fall into the category of Man.
Another issue essential for future investigations should be which conflicts
could emerge in the co-construction of garden assemblages. For instance,
in the bee-human assemblage in the garden “Tre Fontane”, gardeners en-
ter in a relation of alliance with bees, conflicting with the varroa destruc-
tor parasites. Moreover, material-discursive conflicts occur, for example,
between gardeners, between some of the gardeners of “Tre Fontane” and
other pollinating insects, with other invasive plants (even other Ailanthus
plants non-recognised by gardeners as welcomed actors), with marginal-
ized human actors. However, as I did in this article, I argue that it is ex-
tremely relevant and urgent to make visible micropolitics of mutual care
enacted through situated relationalities. The ones described in this text
are possible stories that make visible agencies often located at the margins
of the social sciences, made significant in the emerging interactions.
There may be many other ones. The analysis of entanglements of humans,
plants, and other nonhuman actors shows the power and the capacity for
action and transformation of the latter, which arise exceeding the bound-
aries of human normativity and intentionality. This descriptive and ana-
lytical attempt turns out to be fundamental in order to be able to build
more just multispecies alternatives. In this regard, it becomes clear that
agency is always shared and continuously negotiated, as I explored in the
entanglements materialised around the mellifera bees and the symposium
tree of Ailanthus altissima.


Notes
   1
     These field notes are excerpts of a “multispecies ethnographic work” (Kirksey
and Helmreich 2010) that I carried out in Rome as part of my PhD research between
2017 and 2019.
Del Monte                                                                                   65

    2
       Following Tsing, in this paper I will understand assemblages as open-ended gath-
erings that include human and nonhuman actors, which are constantly mutually trans-
forming. This means wondering, in her words, “how sometimes gatherings become
happenings” (Tsing 2015, 23).
     3
       With this term I refer to the material-discursive assemblage of policies and poli-
tics implemented in the management of green spaces by public institutions and groups
of citizens (vegetal politics on the vegetal) and of political interactions between human
and nonhuman actors (with a specific focus on the agency of the vegetal) through
which public green spaces are co-constructed in the Roman context (vegetal politics of
the vegetal).
     4
       As pointed out by Iovino and Oppermann (2012, 76) body does not only refer to
“the human body but to the concrete entanglements (…) in both human and more-
than-human realms”.
     5
       The Roman urban gardening regulation is available at the following address:
https://www.comune.roma.it/web-resources/cms/documents/Delib_N_38_17.07.2015
.pdf
     6
       For more details on the planning activities of urban decorum regulation approved
by Roman Municipality in 2018 see Deliberazione Giunta Capitolina number 222, 04
December 2018.
     7
       For detailed information on financial cuts and staff decrease tendencies in the
management of green areas and trees in the city see for example: Report 2018, Agenzia
per il controllo e la qualità dei servizi pubblici di Roma Capitale; Report 2016, “Il
verde pubblico di Roma Capitale, Municipal Statistics Office”.
     8
       English version of the website: http://www.zappataromana.net/en.
     9
       See for example the report made by the Council for research in agriculture and
analysis of agrarian economy (CREA - Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi
dell’economia agraria) (2015)
     10
        Here is a list of alien invasive plants present in the Italian territory, contrasted at
the European Union level https://www.lifeasap.eu/index.php/it/specie-aliene-invasive
/rilevanzaunionale. An English version of the website, which enlists some of the alien
invasive species in Italy, is available at https://www.lifeasap.eu/index.php/en/invasive-
alien-species/what-are-they.
     More specific actions and restrictions are present at Italian regional level.


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