Symptoms of Infrastructural Slow Violence in Adolfo Tommasi's 'Allegory of Work'

This analysis of a frieze in Livorno has a bipartite premise: first, it gives prominence to a creative source of insights about heavy industry from the long nineteenth century that is deserving of wider recognition; second, it provides a testing ground for a method of sensing infrastructural slow violence that is apt for shedding light on challenging circumstances from which no corner of the planet can hide forever. I dwell on how tangible heritage is able to speak multimodally to the escalating climate crisis: the humble poorhouse decoration in Tuscany’s third-most populous city has the capacity to open up emotional, temporal, and visceral geographies around polluting practices. My aspiration is to contribute to efforts to bring qualitative methods to bear on a pressing state of affairs that is commonly examined in quantitative fashion. This approach corresponds to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals on 'Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure' and 'Responsible Consumption and Production'.