XXIV edition
9/14 December 2014
Trame, Italy’s south in black and white
PHOTOGALLERY HIGH RES
by Gaetano Savatteri (artistic director of Trame: the Festival of Books about the Mafia(s))
There's a South made up of dirt roads, ramshackle abodes, mules and donkeys, expanses of fields and thick woods outside the law, faces with ancient features, and examples of astonishing cruelty. It's this South - in particular, Sicily and Calabria - that emerges from the archives of the Istituto Luce, which has catalogued its evils since 1947.
The present attests to the fact that there is no easy solution, and that the Mafias - plural - are not just the result of backwardness; they represent a pathology of modern-day life. The 'ndrangheta has left the poor villages of Calabria and the wooded hills of the Aspromonte and has taken root in the industrial heartland of Italy: Lombardy, Piedmont and Emilia.
For this very reason, Trame: the Festival of Books about the Mafia(s), founded five years ago in Lamezia Terme and organized by that city's Antiracket Association, has now travelled north to Courmayeur to arrange a day-long event, in a joint collaboration with Noir in Festival and the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, to talk about those Mafias and the Mafiosi, an anatomy of the underworld that aims to build bridges between north and south, parallel networks that counter the deadly Mafia agendas that are strangling Italy.
"Trame: the South in Black and White" is thus an opportunity to reconstruct our recent past and probe the very roots of this evil that plagues Italy, in order to discover antidotes to the "Mafia contagion," through knowledge. A backwards glance at these blurry, time-worn photographs allows us to reclaim a remarkable treasure trove of visual materials that reconstruct the dark side of Italy's past: things we knew about, but also things of which we were unaware, or ignored. They are proof that we tend to live in a country with no memory, which is distracted or else prefers to conveniently forget, learning very little from its past mistakes and its own naivete.
The archives of the Istituto Luce reward us with a wealth of historical accounts, investigations and visual that piece together the underside of our country, which coincides, in this case, with just one part - the worst part - of its most neglected territory: the South, erstwhile social problem, now an entire dimension, seemingly irredeemable.
PHOTOGALLERY HIGH RES
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PROGRAM
11/12/2014 h 10:00: PalaNoir 2 Panel with Gaetano Savatteri e Armando Caputo, Tommaso De Pace, Nicola Gratteri, Costanza Quatriglio, Carmelo Sardo - In collaboration with Istituto Luce Cinecittą and Festival Trame
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