Dataset 2: Archivio del Futuro Photographic Walks

Description / Abstract This dataset contains selected photographs and contextual metadata from the Archivio del Futuro photographic walks conducted in the territory between Augusta and Siracusa between December 2024 and June 2025. The material documents seven collective walks to “places of the heart”: places chosen by participants because of their emotional, biographical, sensory, or political significance. These places include coastal areas, ruins, gardens, industrial edges, abandoned infrastructures, paths, and other sites where everyday life, memory, work, environmental damage, and future imaginaries intersect. The project understands the archive not as a static collection, but as a living ethnographic-photographic process built through walking, listening, photographing, interviewing, writing, and returning the material to public conversation. As a visual ethnographic dataset, the photographs are not merely illustrations of fieldwork. They are part of the encounter itself. The camera shaped the rhythm of the walks, created pauses, redirected attention, and opened conversations about place, memory, contamination, attachment, abandonment, and possible futures. The photographs therefore materialise situated expertise: not only visual documentation of landscapes, but condensed forms of experience, relation, care, ambivalence, and ecological imagination. The dataset is valuable for analysis because it shows how people inhabit and interpret a late-industrial landscape that is often reduced to oppositions such as beauty or contamination, paradise or sacrifice, tourism or industrial damage. Through the walks, these oppositions become more complex. The images document how industrial infrastructures, coastal environments, ruins, everyday practices, and personal memories are folded into one another in the petrochemical corridor between Augusta and Siracusa. Why the photographic walks are valuable for data analysis Situated visual knowledge: The photographs show how participants make sense of places through embodied movement, memory, and attention. They capture what becomes visible when participants guide the research team through places that matter to them. Trace of the encounter: The images document not only places, but the shared process of walking, pausing, looking, and discussing. They are traces of an ethnographic relation rather than neutral landscape photographs. More-than-textual evidence: Light, distance, framing, bodily presence, ruins, industrial edges, vegetation, sea, and empty spaces become analytic material. They help analyse atmospheres, attachments, silences, contradictions, and affective relations to place. Photo-elicitation and participatory analysis: The photographs can be used to return to conversations with participants, open further reflection, and connect visual material with interviews, fieldnotes, and collaborative writing. Public ethnography and restitution: The photographic archive is also a form of return. Selected images can circulate in exhibitions, books, public encounters, and the future Archivio del Futuro website, creating new conversations rather than only storing research material. How the data can be reused The dataset can be reused for qualitative and visual analysis of themes such as ecological repair, environmental justice, memory, industrial legacies, coastal landscapes, abandonment, work, care, contamination, and future imaginaries. It can also be used for methodological reflection on collaborative visual ethnography, walking methods, photo-elicitation, public anthropology, and ethnographic experimentation. The material can be triangulated with interview transcripts, walking conversations, fieldnotes, workshop materials, and public outputs from Archivio del Futuro. Selected and consented materials may also be useful for teaching participatory research methods, visual anthropology, environmental humanities, and public ethnography, subject to ethical and access restrictions. Ethics & rights note All photographs are reviewed before publication or sharing. Images that include identifiable people, sensitive places, private situations, or contextual information that could create harm are excluded, anonymised, or shared only under restricted access. Authorship is treated as collaborative: the photographs were produced by the research partners within the shared process of Archivio del Futuro, while participants remain co-shapers of the situations, stories, and meanings documented. Selected materials may become publicly available through the Archivio del Futuro website after final consent review. Full access to the photographic archive remains restricted and subject to academic, non-commercial use, non-redistribution, and prior written permission for any public reproduction.