CLAUDIO MENNA
CLAUDIO MENNA
CLAUDIO MENNA
"LOBOS"
In the last years beheading of several criminal families related to Camorra System brought kids – as sons or grandchildren – taking power to control their business. Hungry to show their value and potential they created small and big group of "soldiers" known by media as "Baby gangs". With no rules and no mercy they always move in packs, often they rob and attack with the only sadistic taste to do it. In the last years in Naples there have been dozens of attacks against teenagers with a ferociy and brutality too similar to that of Roberto Saviano’s TV show “Gomorra”. First of them were sons - or related - to criminal leaders detained for life sentences or decades in prison; in a short while their attitude made a strange trend where kids and teens from difficult areas of the city turned themselves in baby gangsters following those behaviors of violence and anger, although they did not belong to criminal traditions.
On september 2015 during a "stesa" - a criminal attack made by young members of baby gangs which shoot with automatic weapons on air, forcing people to throw spread on ground (litterally "stesi al suolo") the young Gennaro Cesarano - a 16 yo teen from Rione Sanità - was accidentally killed. His death brought between the youngest of neighborhood, his closed friends, a wave of haterd difficult to be curbed. Associations, Ngo's and volunteers started an hard work to avoid a new kind of war, different from those made by Camorra leaders in '80s. A war without any kind of rules, and ethical limits.
Rione Sanità is a popular and historical district of Naples located inside the city belly, known by most for the every day news about criminal organizations, drugs dealing, murders and baby gangs, as almost every popular districts in Naples. Despite its recent emancipation where cultural aggregation points and associations are working hard to take away kids from streets and from a marked path, it’s always an unresolved issue. Total absence of government’s authorities creates for decades inside “Rione Sanità” a parallel world where survival entrusted to common sense often trampled by crime and their way to promise easy money for all neighborhood’s kids, for them indispensable as dealers or sentinels.
After the tv show “Gomorra”, crime and criminals have been projected in common imaginary as “Guest Stars”, stereotypes and model to follow for all those kids without any family support.
"Lobos" is a report started several years ago about last generation of kids and teens born after 2000's inside Rione Sanità, my mother's neighborhood; the main actors of this story are all connected directly or indirectly to what happened few years ago to Gennaro Cesarano, a 16yo teen accidentally mourdered during a criminal attack made by teens of a rival district.
"Lobos" is an anthropological report about the main cause which lead youngest who live in a popular neighborhood as Rione Sanità to take criminal paths. I tried to investigate - diving myself in this reality - how the absence of Government and Municipality affect their lives, made mostly, by family issues, school dropout, bad habits, traditions, religion and paganism, fake myths, smoke sellers and dealers of illusions. (Photo and text © Claudio Menna)
From Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Covid-19 Diary
When Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on March 9th 2020 declared a national emergency and quarantine for the whole country due to the danger of covid-19 infection, concern of many Italians was not immediately to contract the virus, but that of facing everyday life without the possibility of working.
Much of the Italian economy is made up of undeclared workers or occasional collaborators who, if lucky, have contracts to provide services.
Emergency generated a mobilization of all those realities that already operated in risky neighborhoods, transforming and adapting their work.
San Gennaro Onlus Foundation has been operating in the Rione Sanità for over 10 years with the mission of assisting families in difficulty and the so-called minors at risk whose neighborhood abounds. Rione Sanità a popular district in the belly of Naples; organized crime, baby gangs and social disorder used to controll everything here.
About two decades ago a priest come in this neighborhood and started a cultural and social revolution creating associations ong and a popular
movement where the common goal has always been help new generations, trying to find them a solution and a alternative to street life.
There's a symphonic Orchestra made of almost 100 kids and teens. There's a theatre company, a film school and even a boxing gym inside an old church where masters are two olympic champions police men. The main concern has been organized crime could have helped these people giving them money to strenghten its power.
So, for these motivations, associations ong's and a lot of realities which work in popular neighborhoods decided to turn their job to help these incredible number of families giving them aid and food.
Those youngsters are working hard to help families in economic troubles and assist elderly people stationated at home to avoit every risk of contagion.
They collect food expenses result of private donations made to Fondazione San Gennaro.
What was done in the Rione Sanità was to readjust their social activities in support of the weakest. Among the various projects born thanks to the San Gennaro Foundation and to Father Antonio Loffredo there is the ReMade Labs, where through the reuse of plastic and metal waste materials reels for 3D printers are created with which products of different types are made. When the problem of the shortage of respiratory machineries arose in Italy, workers of ReMade coordinated by Raniero Madonna young Neapolitan engineer and activist decided to readjust their production by creating plastic components to be assembled to the breathing masks and lung ventilators of intensive and sub intensive cares .
Text and photos © Claudio Menna
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© Claudio Menna 2021. All righs are reserved