Karst geographies. Permeable metamorphoses of the landscape

The following work is part of an ongoing doctoral thesis in Landscape and Environment, in which karst expresses the coexistence between rock and water, not as an abstract entity but as a vital materiality (Bennett, 2010): a permeable body that operates through geomorphological transformation processes, acquiring ecological, cultural, political, social relevance and therefore about landscape. The objective is to transcend the narrative of the karst landscape as a static and passive product and recognize it as an agent in its material existence (act as existing), which transforms itself and generates continuous exchanges of energy. Indeed, the karst action is expressed through the dissolution and deposition of calcium carbonate (De Waele andPiccini, 2008), but also through the interrelations between different components, thus becoming a complex system which produces moving morphologies according to various degrees of karstification (Forti, 1977). This repositioning could promote a greater awareness of the processes we are part of and depend on. A multidisciplinary reading of karst, from the perspective of landscape architecture, allows the investigation of its vitality and vertical thickness, through the convergence of several humanities, technical, and scientific disciplines (including philosophy, architecture, geology, etc.) into a shared space of knowledge. Karst is interpreted through the geographies inherited from the phenomenon, underst ood as the material space of the landscape. The focus is on the Mediterranean area, examining karst alterations and their consequences on resource management, linked to extreme weather events driven by the climate crisis. Later, a specific geography is chosen as experimental part: from largescale studies, the karst behavior of the city of Palermo (Todaro, 2002) emerges, explored and envisioned through the contemporary landscape project. It is interesting to observe the karst variations of matter, given the biological and geochemical exchanges, which challenge the autonomy of living beings in relation to geomorphological evolutions. An example in which the biotic and abiotic components are interconnected is provided by most of the karstifiable rock, composed of sediments from past marine life, deposited as calcium carbonate, which conditions the success of the phenomenon. This shows a relationship of reciprocity and transcalarity between the surface world and the underground; these two realities find a point of contact in the water source, commonly called springs, understood as the beginning of water flows along the ground surface. However, the various fractures of karst aquifers are gateways to invisible scenarios, where water penetrates, dissolves, erodes, and overflows - an underground operation with multidirectional trends - revealing the non-existence of an origin through the karst metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020). The agency (Bennett, 2010) of this body is supported by the various transformative dynamics, such as slope-scale deformation processes (Khalaf et al., 2025), defining an active state and confirming the dynamism of the phenomenon in space and time. The configuration of a karst allows to identify a permeable, collective and mutating behavior and recognizes the active role of the landscape, as an operational tool to build new and deep relations of the Anthropocene, between different planetary actors, with different sensitivities and modes of action.