How to Become a Mountain: The Entangled Becoming of Rosalia and Palermo

This work examines the vibrant entanglement of Santa Rosalia and the city of Palermo through the lenses of posthuman feminism and new materialist philosophies. It argues that both the saint and the city are living, agentic entities that continually shape one another as part of material, historical, and affective assemblages. By engaging with Palermo and Rosalia as co-constitutive forces, this study challenges humanist frameworks that separate nature and culture, the human and the non-human, and the material and the discursive. Arts-based research and emergent walking methodologies allow this exploration and learning with/in entanglements—of city and saint, of researcher and saint, and researcher and city. Walking as a form of inquiry situates the researcher within Palermo’s living assemblage, allowing knowledge to emerge through movement, sensory experience, and material intra-actions. Visual autoethnography—incorporating photography, sound recording, collage, and writing—serves as a means of engaging with Palermo and Rosalia beyond traditional academic discourse, acknowledging the agency of the non-human and more-than-human in knowledge production. The methodological approach is further informed by posthumanist autoethnography, which positions the self as a fluid, relational, and co-constituted subject rather than a fixed, detached observer. Through this interdisciplinary framework, this study investigates Rosalia’s historical narrative, her material manifestations, and her evolving role in contemporary Palermo, particularly in relation to gender, tourism, and the climate crisis. It considers how Rosalia’s legacy—as a saint who withdrew from society to live within the landscape—offers new ways of thinking about embodiment, resistance, and the nature-culture continuum. Furthermore, the work interrogates the impact of tourism and late-stage capitalism on Palermo’s urban and cultural landscape, examining how Rosalia and Palermo are commodified while simultaneously resisting stable definitions. Ultimately, this research proposes that Rosalia and Palermo live in an ongoing process of becoming, where boundaries between saint and city, human and non-human, subject and object, sacred and quotidian, remain porous. By attending to their relationality, this study not only contributes to discussions in posthuman feminism and materialist philosophy but also offers insights into ethical modes of being-with and knowing-with in an era of ecological precarity.