Lockdown Cartographies: Active Bodies, Public Spaces and Pandemic Atmospheres in Italy

During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, conceptualisations of sport and physical activity as contested (bio)political domains acquired new layers of meaning. As the country became the pandemic epicentre in Europe and enacted restrictive lockdown measures, already-existing concerns related to the government of “illegitimate” bodies and practices in public spaces extended to the entire population. This chapter interrogates how the body/space/health/security nexus has been experienced, understood and (re)assembled within and beyond this timeframe in Italy. Articulating the different physical, spatial and health domains that public and political debates foregrounded or made inaccessible, we discuss how the pandemic event contributed to exacerbate differential definitions of (life)worth and deservingness in Italy. Through the notion of pandemic atmospheres, we then interrogate what physical cultures (can) emerge from the ruins left by anthropic devastations and the “intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015 [2009]) as a political subjectivity in the late-capitalist world-order.