Echo Revisited: Incapacitation, Exploitation, Reverberation

The world of the past and those civilisations that preceded ours is no longer. Our poems and stories cannot comfortably stage anymore “fresche, chiare et dolci acque” like those in Francesco Petrarca’s famous poem, where they appear as a harmonious background for characters of the natural kingdom. Today, they capitulate instead to the presence of contaminated waters bearing the signs of impending death or incipient destruction. Such are our expanses. In our world, Echo, the still disdained nymph in love with prideful and haughty-hearted Narcissus, can no longer naturally inhabit a landscape of unspoiled beauty. Instead, she finds herself residing in woods and along rivers soiled with filth, darkly tinted, and increasingly subject to human dominion. To phrase things differently, in our time and day, Echo, incapacitated herself, would dwell in a waste land of incapacitation, exploitation and death