Project

The ecological crisis is also a crisis of meaning. VAMP (GA No. 101106065) starts from this premise to develop a new semiotic framework for understanding the Anthropocene.

Whereas conventional approaches interpret the ecological crisis as a crisis of nature, the Anthropocene hypothesis—the geological epoch marked by the impact of human industrial activities—suggests that what we are actually facing is a crisis in the ways we conceive of the environment, including the very distinction between nature and culture.

If the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of meaning, then ecological controversies become a privileged site for observing how competing understandings of the environment are produced, negotiated, and contested. Social groups "give voice" to non-human entities through semiotic and political mechanisms of representation, thereby advancing different ways of imagining, organizing, and transforming collective life.

The project's main objective is to develop a transferable analytical framework for investigating these dynamics. This framework is articulated around three complementary research directions: (i) deconstructing environmental rhetorics whose transformative potential remains limited; (ii) reconfiguring human and non-human assemblages along more sustainable lines; and (iii) rethinking the "environment" as the effect of a polyphony resonating simultaneously across the technosphere, biosphere, and infosphere.

The framework is developed and refined through the comparative analysis of two emblematic ecological controversies, each illustrating a different way in which non-human entities become politically represented: (i) the opposition to the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam, as an attempt to redefine the relationship between culture and the economy in the Amazon region; and (ii) the mobilization against the high-impact rail line connecting Turin, Italy, and Lyon, France.

Photographed by Bruno Batista in 2021

Belo Monte hydroelectric plant

The Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam, built on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon, is one of the largest hydroelectric projects in the world. Promoted by the Brazilian government to expand renewable energy production and support industrial development, it has also become one of the most emblematic ecological controversies in contemporary Brazil. Since its conception in the 1970s, the project has profoundly shaped environmental activism, public debate, journalism, and jurisprudence, making Belo Monte a privileged site for investigating the politics of ecological conflicts.

For VAMP, Belo Monte is not simply a dispute over the environmental impacts of a large infrastructure project. It offers an opportunity to investigate how ecological controversies emerge from competing processes of sense-making. On the one hand, the Xingu River is represented as a strategic energy resource, capable of sustaining economic growth and national development. On the other, Indigenous peoples, ribeirinho communities, and environmental movements give voice to the river as a living territory whose ecological, cultural, and social relations cannot be reduced to its economic value.

These competing representations are not merely symbolic. They shape different understandings of what counts as development, prosperity, territory, and collective well-being. The construction of the dam, which became operational in 2016, altered the river's flow, transformed extensive areas of rainforest, and displaced thousands of people despite compensation and relocation programs. For many affected communities, however, material compensation could not restore the relationships, practices, and ways of inhabiting the environment that had been disrupted.

Seen from this perspective, Belo Monte is not simply an environmental dispute or a conflict of interests. It is a conflict between competing systems of meaning through which rivers, communities, and the environment itself are understood and politically represented. The controversy revolves around questions that are simultaneously political and semiotic: What counts as a home? What does development mean? What makes a community prosperous? By examining these competing answers, VAMP explores how ecological conflicts emerge from divergent ways of giving voice to non-human entities and organizing collective life.

Photographed by Poudou99 in 2025

Lyon - Turin railway

The Lyon–Turin high-speed rail line is one of the largest infrastructure projects currently under construction in Europe. Conceived in the late 1980s, it envisages a new 271-kilometre railway linking France and Italy, centred on the construction of a 57-kilometre base tunnel beneath the Alps—the longest railway tunnel in the world. Initially promoted by LTF (Lyon Turin Ferroviaire) and currently managed by TELT (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon Turin), the public company responsible for the cross-border project, the railway is expected to cost more than €26 billion, with estimates continuing to rise following delays and concerns repeatedly highlighted by the European Court of Auditors.

For more than three decades, the project has generated one of Europe's longest-running ecological controversies. Alongside governments, European institutions, engineers, and industrial actors, it has mobilized local administrations, scientists, environmental organizations, and, above all, the No TAV movement. Since the early 2000s, No TAV has become one of Europe's most enduring and influential environmental movements, transforming the Susa Valley into a laboratory of political experimentation where alternative ways of imagining mountain life, territorial governance, and development continue to be debated and enacted.

For VAMP, the Lyon–Turin controversy offers an opportunity to investigate how competing processes of sense-making shape different understandings of mobility, territory, and development. For the project's promoters, the new railway embodies technological innovation, European integration, and ecological transition, promising to shift freight transport from road to rail while strengthening transnational connectivity. Opponents, by contrast, question both the necessity of the new line and the assumptions that sustain it, arguing that the existing railway remains largely underused and that the environmental, social, and economic costs of the project outweigh its expected benefits.

At stake is not simply the construction of a new railway, but the meaning of mobility itself and the role that transport infrastructures are expected to play in shaping territorial futures. The controversy raises fundamental questions about who the railway is for, whose forms of life it is meant to support, and which vision of development it embodies. For its promoters, the project continues a model of territorial integration inherited from the industrial era, in which Alpine valleys function primarily as strategic corridors connecting major urban and economic centres. For its opponents, however, this vision no longer reflects the realities of mountain regions, whose futures are increasingly shaped by global environmental crises—water scarcity, climate change, rising temperatures, glacier retreat, and the growing fragility of tourism-based economies—as well as by the broader decline of the industrial geography that originally justified the project. At the heart of the controversy lies a broader effort to reimagine mountain territories—not as spaces whose value derives from facilitating external flows, but as places capable of generating their own forms of mobility, development, and collective life.

VAMP approaches these questions by examining how such competing visions are produced, stabilized, and negotiated through processes of sense-making. Rather than treating the railway as a neutral technical object, the project investigates how mobility infrastructures become sites where different territorial identities, ecological futures, and models of development are imagined and politically enacted. Questions such as Who is mobility for? What kinds of territories should transport infrastructures create? Can Alpine valleys be imagined as more than corridors connecting metropolitan centres? reveal that the Lyon–Turin controversy is ultimately a struggle over the meanings through which mobility, development, and collective life are organized.