ECO-WORDS LAB: ECO-COMMUNICATION WORKSHOP

The Lab aims to offer participants the opportunity to practically apply good practices of eco-communication to everyday life. The areas in which it is applied are diverse: from daily life interactions to various forms of public communication, from advertising language to the broader realm of visual imagery.

On the concept of “speech pollution”

(from the second chapter of Eco-thoughts. Conversations with a Polluted Mind, Routledge, London 2024):

The words we listen to during childhood, when our identities are fragile and still being shaped, leave indelible marks on us, both positive and negative. It is almost as if the streams of words we listened to as children form a sort of magical and imperceptible layer that accompanies us for the rest of our lives like invisible armour. In it we may grow up feeling happy and protected or, on the contrary, trapped and imprisoned, unable to respond, petrified victims of the repeated violence we have been exposed to. Indeed, we may say that the words we listen to in childhood are our destiny, in the sense that they will inspire and shape both the words we listen to when we become adults and those we learn to speak. Being familiar with something – something that resonates with, together – is what solidifies a path, a stream of words and thoughts. It is the habit of joy, happiness, success, care; or, on the contrary, the habit of verbal violence, invisibility, humiliation, judgement. The problem is our vantage point, the point from which we observe what we experience, which is always inside us. This means that if we are used to being denigrated, treated badly, humiliated, we will end up thinking that such situations are normal, i.e. we will not classify them as ‘humiliation’ or ‘abuse’. Being familiar with those feelings is what makes them ‘normal’, it is what makes them invisible to the subject experiencing them. Once they become invisible, those conditions – despite being extreme for an external observer – become a sort of steel cage, from which it seems almost impossible to escape. Escape is all the more impossible the tighter the grip of the fierce and unyielding guardian that inhabits us. In other words, we are our worst enemy. And this enemy is inside us. The worst acts of sabotage – the ones that are more likely to succeed – are the ones we plan ourselves. This, however, is a long and silent journey, one that starts in childhood and continues in adulthood.

Everything begins with the words and thoughts of someone else, words and thoughts we listen to, that feed us at an age in which it is impossible to say no. As adults, we find ourselves in that same position of submissiveness, in the same position of consternation every time we hear someone utter the same sequence of words. If our father spoke toxic and poisonous words, these will be deposited in our subconscious memory and whenever another adult male utters similar words we resonate, petrified, assuming the old submissive posture – as if under the influence of a terrifying spell –, the one we adopted the first time we heard them. This is how, inadvertently, as adults, we find ourselves in improbable and hilarious situations. The plumber attacks us, and instead of telling him to get lost, politely bringing him down a peg, we feel crushed and endure the verbal violence. The point is that we are not actually dealing with the plumber, we are answering our father once again and for the one hundredth time, as we have been forever frozen in the trauma being repeated by these words. There are parts of us – adult and conscious parts – we perform in the world, while other parts – childish and traumatised – we do everything we can to ignore. Trauma, however, demands to be listened to, it demands to be looked at and embraced by the rest of our subjectivity. Otherwise it turns into an unrelenting tyrant, an invisible and undisputable despot that intervenes in all of our interactions. What we must ask is: can I and do I want to be only and exclusively my trauma, or my traumas, for the rest of my life? Can I also be something or someone else? Speaking of this, Stefano De Matteis uses an interesting metaphor that helps understand how the vulnerability that comes with suffering can become the object of a conscious choice: “This is what the lobster dilemma consists in: to leave one’s armour behind, to realise it is temporary, stop using as trenches the certainties that in the present only make us suffer, and expose oneself to risk, having the courage and strength to choose vulnerability. Indeed, vulnerability turns out to be a moment of extreme and fundamental strength. It is a decisive step. Because it brings about change and is the prelude to the reconstruction of a new life.” Also, with regard to the concept of limitation, he adds: “Limitation is the implicit world available to us, and the explicit possibility we have of overcoming our being finite. Going back to the initial metaphor: the lobster’s armour is part of ‘its’ nature, while a limitation is an integral part of ‘our’ cultural nature, it helps us become a human being.”

On “good practices of eco-conversation”

(from the second chapter of Eco-thoughts. Conversations with a Polluted Mind, Routledge, London 2024):

The art of answering the ‘real’ question

In everyday life it sometimes happens that we hear questions or overhear parts of a conversation in which a subject states something intending to say something else. In such a circumstance, to be effective we must listen with our inner ear, because relying on the mere physical sound of words is not enough. Our inner ear is the curious state of mind that allows us to grasp what is rustling between the lines of a conversation, to go beyond and behind the words of another person and understand their deepest intentions. Exercising this ability to listen becomes the most effective way to avoid the development of pathological communication, which is otherwise inevitable. In fact, the interlocutor – who says A, meaning B – constructs a semantic ambiguity, an interactional contradiction that is enough to initiate a pathological type of conversation. However, sometimes a small miracle takes place: the listener manages to dodge the blow by answering the real question. A good example of this dynamic is a scene in the 2010 film Loose Cannons directed by Ferzan Özpetek. In one of the most important scenes of the film, Tommaso’s grandmother (played by Ilaria Occhini) says to her loyal maid, who has just showed her affection: “You’re so ugly.” Instead of taking offence, the young maid answers: “I love you too, ma’am.” It is as if the young maid were able to speak the delicate language the wise but rude lady uses to express herself. Instead of demonstrating her affection, the woman is only able to say: “You’re so ugly.” It sounds like the dialogue of two crazy people, while in fact it is a profound dialogue, in which the question and the answer are separated by other parts of a silent conversation taking place between the most intimate feelings of the two women. What we say with words does not always coincide with our feelings and the notion of lying is not enough to describe these cases. It is not, in fact, a matter of lying, but rather of using ‘bad words’.

The art of answering the real question being posed allows us to give a real answer to the person speaking to us and to do so effectively, though, most importantly, it requires an act of empathy and understanding on our part. In other words, it means asking ourselves: “What is her problem? Why is she using such aggressive words?” before answering.

In a very successful play, the Sicilian comedian Teresa Mannino recounts what happens every time she returns to Sicily and is reunited with her family. She tells us, in a funny way, how her various aunts, grandmothers and cousins react to the fact she is slim, as if there were something to be ashamed of, which is commented on every time they meet. She is constantly told: “Are you eating?” “You must eat something!” “Are you on a diet?” “Why aren’t you eating?” “You look unwell” “Common, you must eat, eat something!” This is all repeated with a slight Sicilian accent that transforms simple sequences of words into small and precious linguistic-cultural cameos. What is their problem? Why does Teresa’s beauty and her being in perfect physical shape cause these reactions? We have all happened to witness this type of conversation between an overweight woman and another younger and thinner woman. What is surprising is that it only takes a few seconds for the woman who is thinner to become too thin, at which point and endless list of offensive comments follows. Also in this case we must ask ourselves: “What is the problem?” How often would we like to answer: “Don’t worry, you are already beautiful, as long as you are happy with your size and weight.” However, this is actually not possible, because the truth is that our interlocutor, who cannot come to terms with the fact she is overweight, and is therefore asking us to put on weight together with her, would feel hurt, indeed very hurt. All the same, if we are able to guess what the problem is the conversation becomes more effective and allows us to respond with a slight smile, the twitch of an eye, which alone is able to reveal a world. The point is that women and men are neither too fat nor too thin. Our weight is exactly what we want it to be; above all, nobody wants their actual and desired weight – which we choose daily when deciding what to eat – to be the subject of conversation, to be judged or evaluated by whoever feels like it. The standard cannot be externalised, it cannot be decided by others. So who should be making this decision? Once again, the conversation is being infiltrated by the malignant adverb and we should ask: “Too much according to me or you? How dare you? Why don’t you keep your ‘too much’ to yourself?”