Communities, art and science to tackle vector-borne diseases
Invasive mosquitoes of the genus Aedes are a serious problem for public health worldwide as vectors of numerous diseases and the development of “green” and sustainable control practices, alternative to pesticides, is an urgent priority, as the WHO recently pointed out. The active involvement of local communities is considered a key factor for the success of sustainable vector control programs.
Local
Italy
Procida Island, Campania Region
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-09-30
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Department of Biology - University of Naples Federico II Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Marco Last name of representative: Salvemini Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Associate Professor in Genetics Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Cinthia 26 Town: Naples Postal code: 80126 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 081 253 5004 E-mail:marco.salvemini@unina.it Website:https://stoptigre.evosexdevo.eu/en/
Name of the organisation(s): School of New Technologies of Arts - Academy of Fine Arts of Naples Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Franz Last name of representative: Iandolo Gender: Male Nationality: Italy If relevant, please select your other nationality: Italy Function: Professor of New Media Art Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, 107 Town: Naples Postal code: 80138 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 339 644 4420 E-mail:franziandolo@gmail.com Website:https://www.nuovetecnologiedellarte.it/
Invasive mosquitoes are a serious problem for public health worldwide as vectors of numerous diseases. Among them, the invasive Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus is particularly important for Europe, where it arrived in 1979. The negative impact of insecticides on the environment, biodiversity, and human health, the problem of pesticide resistance, and the absence of vaccines against diseases transmitted by mosquitoes make the development of sustainable control practices an urgent priority, as the WHO recently pointed out.
By combining for the first time the actions of scientists, artists, and citizens, we developed the “Open Science” (OS) project, designing an innovative protocol of community engagement optimized for eco-sustainable monitoring and control of the Asian tiger mosquito. We used the relationship and the gift to create a virtuous interaction with the citizens of Procida island (Italy) inviting them to participate in a program to monitor tiger mosquitoes using traps. Citizens have also been the subject of a 3D “live scan” of their persona and photo portraits. The resulting 3D-printed “miniatures” and pictures have been used to create artistic installations through which the local community could recognize themselves, increasing the sense of belonging. The data produced every week by citizens have been used by researchers to study the spatial-temporal dynamics of the mosquito population. These data have been returned to the community through an online animation, ad-hoc developed, which allows a simple and strong visual impact to understand the progress of the eco-sustainable actions underway on the territory.
The actions developed also aimed to increase the local cohesion of the community using as a driving force the common objective of eliminating the Asian tiger mosquito and the ambition to make the island one of the first places in the world free from this invasive vector using participatory, innovative, and sustainable methods.
Vector control
Citizen-science
Community engagement
Relational art
Art-science transdisciplinary approach
Insect disease vectors are an important risk factor for public health and the development of a territory. The Asian tiger mosquito is an invasive species of particular importance for its ability to transmit several viruses. In Europe this species has been involved, in the last twenty years, in many events of autochthonous transmission of the Chikungunya virus (Italy, France),the Dengue virus (Spain, Croatia, and France), and, more recently, the Zika virus (France). The fight against insects harmful to humans, including mosquitoes, has been fought to date mainly using chemical pesticides, molecules that are considered by the scientific community a central responsible factor for the observed terrestrial biodiversity declines.
The main goal of the OS project in terms of sustainability has been to develop and test in the field an innovative and interdisciplinary modality of community engagement to involve citizens in actions of monitoring and control of the Asian tiger mosquito, using eco-friendly methods such as the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT).
The SIT is a “green” method that is based on the release into the field of a large number of sterile male insects, only of the species that is intended to fight, which compete with the males present in nature for mating with the females, lead to a progressive reduction in the number of new individuals born, allowing to arrive, under appropriate conditions, also at eradication of the alien species.
To date, more than thirty pilot studies of SIT against mosquitoes of the genus Aedes are underway all over the world. For the success of these trials are considered essential premises: 1)the selection of an appropriate and, possibly geographically isolated, study site, 2)the collection of preliminary data on the bionomics of local populations, and 3)the active involvement of the local community. With our OS project, we aimed to contribute to these three relevant objectives, making the SIT application more feasible and effective.
The main goal of the OS project has been to involve citizens in a project of study and control of a vector but, at the same time, to design actions able to nourish a strong sense of community, through “care” (making the common living spaces nicer and filled with positive emotions through arts), “protection” (reducing mosquito density by using eco-friendly methods), and “love” (building a positive and deep interpersonal relationship), making each inhabitant a witness of the interest in the common territory.
The involvement of people took place using "relational accelerator tools" (see project methodology section), devices whose design was made to be captivating and at the same time to convey the key message of the entire project: respond to the challenges of life by acting as a community instead of as individuals. Better together!
During the “opera event” in June 2022, the final and cathartic moment of the entire relational artistic process, an invitation to travel was created, a dreamlike journey that allowed the inhabitants of the island to start dreaming again on that same territory crossed daily, through digital and analogic aesthetic devices including the scenarios (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGy0OxmcJL4; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URKCnT2WC1Y; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VEEyGiZLng). The scenarios were set up on the streets and in the shops of Procida: penguins, ostriches, mouths, cacti, etc., alienating elements, extraneous to the real context of the island, making aesthetic contrast with the Procida territory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGxNrx4w5U).
In addition, from the study of the territory during the six months of the project, we produced a short film entitled "In praise of slowness" to share with the inhabitants of the island, co-authors of the entire project, all the emotions experienced and to thank them for having welcomed them into their private dimension (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNM1Rg7WEY8&t=5s).
The OS project has been developed, since the beginning of its genesis, to be as much as inclusive as possible. The project, thanks to its innovative and inclusive method of engagement, based on door-to-door actions and social communication, allowed to involve of many people during the six months of the project, including:
• 50 first-grade secondary school students.
• 100 second-grade secondary school students.
• 4 first-grade secondary school teachers in Procida.
• 6 second-grade secondary school teachers in Procida.
• 318 families on the island were involved as volunteers in the management of the 501 traps for tiger mosquitoes.
• 159 users of the mobile app developed ad-hoc for sending the capture data.
• 330 merchants of the island were involved during the four phases of the project.
• 18 island associations involved in the realization of the June event.
• About 7000 people were involved in public activities in the square, including the approximately 1600 people scanned in 3D and about 2000 people photographed in first person.
People of every age, sex, educational and professional level, have been included in the project. The inclusive 3D census of a whole local community is, to the best of our knowledge, the first experiment at a global scale (https://nuovetecnologiedellarte.it/archivio-procida/en/archivio-ritratti/).
Citizens benefit from our project at four levels:
1) Environmental education: increasing knowledge on the biology of vector insects and on the good practices that can be implemented to limit the spread of the tiger mosquito.
2) Relationship of trust towards science and the scientific method for the study and resolution of environmental problems.
3) Sense of belonging and collective participation in the life of the community: possibility of co-creating collective activities by making one's talents available.
4) Change of perspective in experiencing the territory and the common spaces thanks to the poetic and dreamlike vision stimulated by the artistic installations during the months of the project.
Civil society has been involved in four ways:
1) Direct door-to-door involvement activity using a gift as a “relational accelerator” and building relationships between OS team members and citizens.
2) Social media communication campaign to involve younger people, launch call-to-actions, and invite people to public events.
3) Distribution of mosquito traps and training activities at private property sites to involve citizens in the monitoring of the Asian tiger mosquito.
4) Co-organization of a public event in the form of a community party, held in the month of June 2022.
The impact of public involvement was relevant. In May 2022, in just 5 days, 500 mosquito traps were placed and then managed by citizens up to September 2022. Collected data were utilized to study the bionomics of the mosquito population on the island, and to plan the future release of sterile male mosquitoes to suppress the infesting population. The network of relationships built during 2022 with the Procida community, will be utilized to design a low-cost protocol for capillary sterile males release on the territory, based on community participation.
We engaged four main stakeholders in our OS project that had a crucial role in the success of the project:
1) Municipal administration of Procida Island: they provided us with logistic support, legal authorizations to perform the project on the island territory, and direct contact with local associations and facilitators. In addition, the Procida Mayor (Raimondo Ambrosino) and three municipal counselors (Rossella Lauro, Antonio Carannante e Michele Assante Del Leccese) participated as volunteers in the mosquito monitoring activities using traps in their properties, providing a fundamental “example effect” for the community.
2) Organizing committee of Procida Italian Capital of Culture 2022: they provide us with financial and logistic support for the implementation of the operative phases of the project.
3) Schools of the Island: they helped us by organizing meetings at school to involve students in mosquito monitoring and artistic activities.
4) Local citizen associations (including Associazione Vivara, Associazione Borgo Marinari, Parrocchia di San Giuseppe, and Associazione Isola di Graziella): they provide us help in the design and implementation of public activities and hospitality in their houses of fifty students for the whole project duration.
The relationship between Art and Science has always been as much of mutual attraction as antagonistic. However, the distance that marks the definition of the two fields is less wide when one passes from theory to practice, entering the common horizon of research.
From this convergent vision derives the OS project, implemented using the following disciplines: molecular genetics, entomology, insect biotechnology, multimedia design, theories of multimedia arts, new media art, digital photography, sound space design, integrated new media techniques, interactive software design, anthropology of complex societies, computer graphics.
The OS project has allowed, both in the design phase and the field execution, an interdisciplinary art-science work, that has involved three professors of the Department of Biology of the University of Naples Federico II and seven professors of the Academy of Fine Arts as well as five students of the degree course in Biology of the Biology Department of the University of Naples Federico II and 150 students of the New Technologies for Art course of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples. The actions implemented have allowed a bidirectional exchange of knowledge and skills and have significantly improved the engagement and communication skills of students and teachers of the University of Naples Federico II. The use of the scientific method for the design and implementation of actions on the territory has enormously enriched the young artists who took part in the project.
During the design phase of the project, theoretical lessons were held by students of the department of Biology to the students of the Academy of Fine Arts and vice-versa. Then, five teams, made by students of both the department of Biology and the Academy of Fine Arts, were organized. The five teams performed all the field activities of the OS project, including both scientific and artistic aspects.
The impact of the Open Science project's innovative community-engagement methods on bringing people closer to the natural world and on participating in citizen-science initiatives with an environmental background has been surprising. As an example, in just 5 days, the five teams of scientists and artists around the island managed to place and activate 500 mosquito traps, thanks to the massive participation of the local community. Such a result would have been difficult to achieve otherwise just by researchers.
In addition, we evaluated the socio-cultural impact (the change in knowledge, attitude, and practices of the Procida citizens regarding the fight against the Asian tiger mosquito and the willingness to participate in similar initiatives in the future and the strengthening of the sense of belonging to the community of the participants) and the environmental impact (the environmental change of the properties visited during the project in terms of elimination of mosquito larval breeding sites). To do the evaluation we applied a comparative questionnaire (comparing data produced in 2015 and 2019); a project satisfaction questionnaire; a data analysis of social network interactions; a media coverage analysis (articles, reports, and interviews); an environmental analysis of the properties visited at the beginning and end of the project. We observed for all the selected indicators, a numerical value higher than the set objectives. The approval of the initiative proved to be full, and the number of people actively involved exceeded expectations. The environmental rating of about 80% of the properties has been improved.
The full process of the OS project will be organized as a “protocol”, with a step-by-step guide to be followed to apply it to different geographical areas or contexts. The protocol will be published as a scientific publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The writing of the manuscript is currently in progress.
The OS project is a part of the wider STOPTIGRE project, that has been taking place on the island of Procida since 2015 and has the ambitious goal of achieving an eco-sustainable eradication on the island of Procida of the alien species A. albopictus, through the active involvement of citizens in research and control activities. The island of Procida has unique characteristics for the project: small size (only 3.7 Km2), high population density, high density of the Asian tiger mosquito population, and famous image in the world, today also as the Italian Capital of Culture 2022. The STOPTIGRE project started with pilot experimentation involving only 13 volunteers (including the mayor of Procida Raimondo Ambrosino) who helped to manage, weekly from April to December 2016, 26 monitoring traps distributed throughout the island. Subsequently, an increasing number of citizens have been involved, including students from the schools on the island.
Despite the success in involving hundreds of citizens during these years of activities of the STOPTIGRE project, we realized that a different and innovative engagement approach should be applied on the island to successfully involve the whole island community and to ensure a true sustainable eco-friendly elimination of the Asian tiger mosquito. To move from a citizen-science approach toward a community-science approach, we designed the innovative OS project in collaboration with relational artists of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples.
To the best of our knowledge, our project was the first-ever worldwide involving scientists, artists, and the local community to monitor and control the Asian tiger mosquito. In addition, the OS project was included in the official program of activities of Procida Italian Capital of Culture for the year 2022 (https://www.procida2022.com/scienza-aperta).
(Please, watch the video, available as YouTube links, in the order you encounter them in the text, preferably not at the end of the text reading but during the reading).
The project has been organized into four operative phases. PHASE 1: 150 people, including members of the Dept. of Biology of the University of Naples and the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, have explored the territory of Procida island, divided into five zones, to build relationships and start interactions with the local community through the use of “gift” as a “relational accelerator tool” (https://youtu.be/Mf6f7uoaZsM). PHASE 2: citizens were invited to become protagonists of portraits and 3D scans. This material was used to create two representations of the island community involved in the project: the murals (https://youtu.be/bB4UUbHfIkE) and a 3Dcensus (https://youtu.be/8A8pkx0XnWA). At the same time, starting from the network of relationships built, citizens were invited to actively take part in a monitoring experiment of the Asian tiger mosquito using gravitraps. In just 5 days, 500 gravitraps were placed in about 400 private properties distributed throughout the island (https://youtu.be/QNqdDpmhpow). Citizens were asked to manage the gravitrap, biweekly sending photos of the sticky sheets with captured mosquitoes. PHASE 3: an “Opera-Event” entitled “NOI IO MA NOI” (“NOT ME BUT US”) was staged, as a widespread “relational anthropological sculpture” co-created with citizens, which made visible the network of relationships built, the sense of community and the actions of care through art and science, able to have a positive impact on the territory (https://youtu.be/_74HMUXNC3s). Finally, in PHASE 4, the project ended with a public restitution event of the data collected during the six months of experimentation, organized as a “scientific coffee evening”, held in conjunction with numerous laboratory activities prepared for the European researchers’ night 2022 (https://youtu.be/wCaApo8deJM).
The four operative phases of our project have been preceded by a seven-month-long study and design period (PHASE 0) during which we adapted the project to the features of the territory of the Procida island. During this period, we explored the island territory, and we interviewed several citizens, administrators, and elderly custodians of the island's traditions and culture.
We included in the design of the project also the scientific knowledge about the Asian tiger mosquito local population, produced during the previous years of activity of the ongoing STOPTIGRE project (https://stoptigre.evosexdevo.eu/en/actions/).
This project development approach and the elements that we developed for the OS project could be applied successfully to other territorial and socio-cultural contexts, not only to tackle insect vectors but also to different relevant environmental topics such as separate waste collection enhancement, monitoring of invasive species, urban regeneration actions, etc.
The global challenges that the OS project addressed are:
1) Global vector-borne disease spreading because of global warming and globalization of trade and travels. We provided an innovative solution to tackle the Asian tiger mosquito through active community participation and the use of eco-friendly and sustainable techniques such as the Sterile Insect Technique.
2) General lack of sense of participation in taking care of common goods such as the environment in which we live. The activities we designed and performed with citizens in their private properties (houses, gardens) and public spaces let us spread a new way of looking at environmental issues such as the management of a disease vector species. Instead of waiting for a centralized solution to the problem by the Municipal administration or sanitary agency, people started to learn about the good practice they can apply immediately to limit the spreading of the vector, experiencing practically, the old traditional concept of “union strength”.
3) Attitude of mistrust or little trust in science and scientists. The citizen-science approach of our project lets common people and researchers work together in the field. This represents a precious opportunity to let people to known about researchers and their experimental work. This virtuous interaction can have a very positive impact on strengthening the relationship between citizens and science, a relationship heavily undermined in recent years, also due to the events related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
4) Societal fragmentation. The activities of the OS project have allowed the strengthening of relationships between the inhabitants and the creation of new ones and ties. The two artistic representations of the local community (3D portraits and murals) allowed citizens to be able to see themselves as a community from the outside, helping to strengthen the sense of belonging and stimulating positive emotions toward participation.
