Ecologies of Labor in Vitaliano Trevisan

This essay focuses on Vitaliano Trevisan's Works (2022), an autobiographical narrative that interweaves the author's employment history with the natural and urban environments in which he lived. Set in Trevisan's native Veneto, this "ecobiography" embraces an analogical and relational poetics. As the writer recounts his work experiences, he regularly uses biological metaphors to account for social phenomena. Labor itself is here a form of ecology, that is, a complex series of relationships through which humans interact with the different spaces they inhabit and create. I argue that, by representing the contemporary market economy through environmental paradigms, Trevisan offers a critique of neoliberalism. In keeping with a biopolitical framework, Trevisan shows that this social and economic model celebrates individual freedom as the supreme value, even as it establishes mechanisms to control subjects in indirect ways through their milieus.