Animal Farm Seminar Series - Spring 2026 | 2 - Mariachiara Ficarelli
AnimalFarm explores the architectural history of animal farming in Europe and North America, from sixteenth-century Palladian villas until late-twentieth-century automated factory farms.
The project engages with the perspectives of critical animal studies, history of veterinary medicine, and labor history. AnimalFarm ultimately explores the historical roots of a controversial phenomenon of the Anthropocene, and it fosters an alternative gaze on the spatial, material, and ethical implications of the human-animal relationship through time.
The AnimalFarm seminar series brings together scholars from different disciplines whose research intersects with architectural and animal history, as well as ethnography, critical animal studies, history of science and design theory.
All talks will be in English, unless specified.
2 - Mariachiara Ficarelli, Senses of Confinement
The speaker:
Mariachiara Ficarelli is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Drawing on environmental and medical anthropology, her research examines labor rights, energy transition, and animal production in relation to the shifting social meanings of rurality and deindustrialization in Northern Italy. She is currently writing her dissertation (tentatively) titled Work After Work, which draws on 24 months of field-based research with farm and factory workers, farm owners and managers, veterinarians, union representatives and rural residents of the bassa padana (the low Po River Valley).
PROGRAM
Monday 11/05 - 14.30–16.30 (CET) Andrea Bagnato, Terra Infecta
Tuesday 19/05 - 9.30–11.30 (CET) Mariachiara Ficarelli, Senses of Confinement
Wednesday 03/06 - 14.30–16.30 (CET) Lisa Carignani, Spazi critici per gli animali (The talk will be in Italian)
INFO: to attend online, please send an email to: sofia.nannini@polito.it
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