Michele Calvello: Landslide Risk, Art and Society

Artistic objects “act” on people’s feelings and emotions, and thus they may become very powerful tools to covey important messages about risk, natural hazards and (more specifically for the theme of this exhibition) landslides. It goes without saying that this is not the main purpose of any work of art, yet, some of them may be “graced” by this secondary effect and they can be profitably seen, appreciated and used by natural science and engineering instructors to talk about risk, in unorthodox ways, in their respective subjects. Drawings and paintings are the forms of art that most easily adapt, and can be adopted, to this purpose. “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed,” allegedly said the famous 19th century Norwegian playwright and artist Henrik Ibsen—who can thus be considered the originator of the widely used expression: an image is worth a thousand words. My talk will exploit this adage, by presenting and commenting a set of renowned, and less well-known, images from works of art that depict landslides and the way they affect(ed) communities in different parts of the world. It’s going to be a journey through time and space, wherein the different points of view and sensibilities of the artists will allow me to deal with many different aspects that characterize these complex phenomena and with the risk they pose to society. From a technical point of view, risk can be expressed in terms of potential consequences (such as loss of life, and destroyed or damaged assets), determined probabilistically as a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Yet risk is also a personal, cultural and societal entity that cannot be constrained in the technical realm, as issues like risk perception, risk acceptability or even risk construction are deeply embedded in the psychological and cognitive private experience of a given person, as well as in the collective culture that a given community expresses in given place at a given time. The “where” and “when” thus become essential to understand and deal with (landslide) risk as much as the “what” that characterizes natural phenomena and the “how” that defines their interactions with anthropogenic elements. Landslide risk, art and society will thus be a spatial and temporal exploration at the intersection of three thematic spheres of influence: the technical, the artistic and the cultural one. Enjoy the journey.

Michele Calvello is associate professor in geotechnical engineering at the University of Salerno (Italy), where he currently teaches “Soil mechanics” and “Landslide Risk,” respectively offered within the Bachelor Degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering and within the Master Degree in Environmental and Land Management Engineering. He graduated with honours in Civil Engineering from Università della Basilicata (Potenza, Italy) in 1997 and he earned a PhD degree from Northwestern University (Evanston, USA) in 2002, with a dissertation on “Inverse analysis of a supported excavation through Chicago glacial clays.” His main research interests are focused on the engineering analysis of geotechnical boundary value problems and on the analysis and management of landslide risk, both at slope and regional scales, with special attention devoted to the following inter-disciplinary topics: early warning systems for rainfall-induced landslides, landslide zoning, risk perception, risk education and community resilience. He is currently the Coordinator of the LARAM School, an International School for PhD students on “LAndslide Risk Assessment and Mitigation.” He is Secretary of the Technical Committee TC-306 “Geo-Engineering Education” and member of the Technical Committees TC-304 “Engineering Practice of Risk Assessment and Management” and TC-309 “Machine Learning and Big Data” of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering. He is Associate editor of the scientific journal “Natural Hazards” and member of the Editorial Board of the journals “Rivista Italiana di Geotecnica” and “Geoenvironmental Disasters.”

The lecture will take place at the Institute of Rock Structure and Mechanics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, V Holešovičkách 94/41, Praha 8.

The lecture will be also streamed online via: https://youtu.be/qUZ-7ocdPPw.

Title image: Paweł Boczkowski, Górozwał we wsi Elm w Szwajcarii (Rockslide of Elm), woodcut, 1881. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org.