SUMMARY

The interview with Alessandra Ponte traces her career across Italy, the US, and Canada. Born in Venice to parents of contrasting social classes, she grew up immersed in culture such as literature, the opera, and art. Her early education was rigorous as, at thirteen, she entered Venice’s art high school. She recalls the violent unrest of the “anni di piombo,” during that time and the train station bombing of 1980 in Bologna, leaving her trapped in the city for hours. Her studies at the IUAV in Venice exposed her to the intellectual discourse of the time. She had read deeply into the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger, and Benjamin. Furthermore, she attended Lacan’s lectures in Venice and spent a year in a seminar on Freud. She also participated in Giancarlo De Carlo’s Urbino summer school, where she encountered Patrick Geddes’s Cities in Evolution, shaping her master’s thesis on Geddes and urban planning. Her doctoral research, under Tafuri, examined town planning and led to investigating landscape debates between Richard Payne Knight and Humphry Repton. Her time as a professor at Princeton further expanded her perspective on landscape as she discovered the desert and American West. At the Université de Montréal, she extended this work toward concepts of Milieux, Umwelt, and territory, influenced by Sloterdijk and the history of science.