Giovanna Del Sarto Northern Africa Emergency Dream from Oltre la Patria/Beyond Homeland Project Northern Africa Emergency Dream is a selection from my long term project Oltre la Patria/ Beyond Homeland that I started in 2008. It is the story of a village, Riace, South of Italy, which opens its abandon houses to refugees who reached the Italian territory illegally. This is a productive and positive way to understand refugees’ situation in a country whose people have been leaving it for centuries in search of better life. The village is virtually deserted. A form of desertion which is common to many Southern Italian villages, especially in Calabria, and which is the painful result of emigration. The wave of Italian immigration at the end of the 19th century, and the one which immediately followed World War II, triggered a mechanism of mobility in the village which, in the space of a couple of decades, led to the desertion of the old town and to the creation of a new Riace, facing the sea, as well as a Riace di Santena, in the province of Turin, and the ones which exist in Argentina, Canada, Australia. The spreading and proliferation of so many Riaces is connected to a progressive decline of the old town. In the 70s, the old buildings started to deteriorate, a lot are not inhabited. Especially the most recent ones (fitted with modern appliances) build by the emigrants who hoped to come back. Besides, in 1950, Upper Riace had 3200 residents; today 600 people live in the old town and 1000 at the sea, this number is higher than it was before people left the place. Emigration, mass escape, is an anthropological condition of the people of Calabria. The hope for Calabria comes from the sea (...). The 1st of July 1998, following the trail of arrivals on nearby coasts (Badolato), 500 Kurds landed on Riace’s shores: an escaping land becomes a land which welcomes people who are escaping. The houses in disrepair were fixed and those which had been long left by their owners emigrated abroad or to the North of Italy, were also used to put up the refugees. The Association Future Town ‘Giuseppe Puglisi’ was created in Riace that adopted a national plan of protection and support for refugees and asylum seekers. The words of one of its founding fathers, and today, the mayor of the town, Domenico Lucano, are quite eloquent: “We have been working from the start in an effort to create a multicultural village where everyone would speak the same language and get on with any other (...) Today we are an emergency center for refugees and asylum seekers, an alternative to the detention centers managed by the government; we also represent an attempt to stop the spreading of the contemporary globalized society that marks the social and cultural differences and forces people to move between South and North. I hope one day to be able to speak the same language as these men and talk with them not about money, but about human rights and dignity”.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 11:50:00 +0000
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