Growing Up in a State of Resistance

IN IMAGES

In the age of the Anthropocene, a generation has chosen to set its body and soul against the inertia of institutions.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Michele Borzoni and Rocco Rorandelli.

Michele Borzoni and Rocco Rorandelli, Italian photographers and founding members of the collective TerraProject, followed these mobilisations for nearly three years, from November 2021 to July 2024. Theirs is a method of patient inquiry: settling into the camps, sharing the long watches, earning the activists’ trust.

The narrative moves through Lützerath, a German village occupied for two years by the activist movement Ende Gelände before its eviction to make way for the Garzweiler lignite mine; through the Val di Susa, where No TAV has spent three decades fighting a high-speed rail line condemned for “its negative environmental footprint”; and through Flémalle, the Belgian gas plant taken over by Code Rood to denounce “the role of natural gas in perpetuating the climate crisis.”

The book is structured as a glossary. Each entry dissects a tactical vocabulary born of urgency: eviction food, energy-dense provisions stockpiled against a police siege, meant to sustain activists once resupply becomes impossible; or treehouses, shelters built into the canopy to delay evictions and shield forests marked for logging.

The title owes its debt to Rachel Carson, the American biologist and essayist whose Silent Spring (1962), a founding text of modern environmentalism, had already denounced the use of pesticides and warned of the silent agony of poisoned ecosystems. Pluralised, the title now names a multiplication of resistance across Europe: so many springs, each on its own scale, refusing to fall silent before heatwaves, megafires, and the collapse of biodiversity.

In Lisbon, the faculties held by End Fossil yield some of the book’s clearest voices. Artur, 19, sums up this intimate turn: “I am not an activist because of passion, but out of necessity.” Francisca, 18, a secondary-school student, finds in it a generational plainness: it is, she says, “crucial to grow up being active.”

The authors make no secret of their gratitude toward those who welcomed them into the intimacy of their struggle. Their images set the human scale against the vertiginous scale of power plants and mines: a figure in white against a landscape gutted by extraction, a wooden hut suspended above a site that threatens to swallow it whole.

Backed by Strategia Fotografia 2025, a scheme run by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, and produced by the Fondazione Studio Marangoni, Florence’s leading centre for contemporary photography, Silent Springs documents a simple conviction: that inaction is no longer tenable, and that this generation, lacking a viable inheritance, is forging one for itself, barricade by barricade.