“That land that is no longer ours, but another planet”. Memory and places after the catastrophe: the Vajont Dam tsunami case

In October 1963, an enormous landslide collapsed into the reservoir of the Vajont Dam, a giant infrastructure recently inaugurated in northern Italy. The resulting megatsunami caused the death of 1910 people and the destruction of locals’ living environment. The event was labelled an “authentic massacre” caused by human greed in a network of colluded powers that could have prevented it. This human catastrophe constituted a severe break in the historical continuity by profoundly marking the line between a “before” and an “after”. The expression of this problematic memory has been at the centre of my previous ethnographic and historical work conducted in 2018 among the survivors and their descendants. This presentation will be discussed the emotional relationship people developed with the destroyed places until now, with a specific emphasis on their conceptions, memory and practices of the first damned and then over flooded river waters.