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.
Claudio Menna
"T H E R I S I N G S U N".
In the last two decades Campania region has been theatre of one of the biggest environmental disaster in the country. After the scandal broke in 2013, almost 10 million tonnes of industrial waste were discovered buried illegally with the help of criminal organization known as Camorra and the complicity of 106’s mayors municipalities.
Italian companies involved in this scandal are almost 450; their waste have been accumulated for two decades in open and underground dump; often these big areas were used by Slavic and Roma communities as temporary settlements where they use to live, until authorities evicted them due to increase of pollution level and biogas releases from the soil with an huge danger for the children which live there.
The scandal about “The Land of Fires” emerged during a study made by American Army about the standard of living of soldiers based in and around Naples, revealing - after all analisys – a high level of water and air pollution, highlighting the presence of Uranium. Dioxin, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals and other toxic substances revealed in the soil, water and air: without any doubt causes of the most diseases between citizens which live inside the “Triangle of Death”. Congenital malformation in this area is 80% superior to the National average and between citizens the most affected are children with a large number of deaths caused by tumors and rare diseases.
The area related to this environmental disaster goes from Naples, its provinces and all around the city of Caserta and its provinces – almost 1,700 square kilometers, about 90 cities and more than 2 millions of people involved in it.
During almost 20 years of systematic burial and spills of toxic waste, soil subsoil air and activities related to them caused an huge risk of aquatic groundwater’s pollution, an irreversibile contamination which unavoidably has had impact on agricolture and breeding, two work activities essential for the local economy.
In this report have been collected stories of people involved in the environmental disaster. Although the subject does not involve and stimulate public opinion much, the problem persists and the people who actually live in those municipalities continue to fall ill and die. The rate of tumor incidence, especially for lymphomas, among minors (including infants) is definitely above average. In view of these figures, citizens continue to rely exclusively on themselves and on the associations they have created to deal with the problems resulting from the disease. Especially the economic ones; the costs of travelling to reach Hospitals outside Campania and for shelters are unsustainable. Many mothers have organized themselves into associations that provide with volunteering and donations to support the families still involved.
Environmental pollution caused by illegal spills and the burial of toxic waste has also had consequences for the agri-food chain. The first checks carried out by the companies in charge of the Campania region led to disastrous results in relation to the analysis of the soil and aquifers that served the fields cultivated in the areas involved. All this has produced, even in the absence of real data, mistrust on the part of buyers towards those local products, fruits and vegetables in the first place. The crisis in the agri-food sector has led big companies to buy under cost the products grown and in some cases these are placed on national and international markets without adequate controls.
Many local producers have organized themselves by managing the physical chemical controls of their lands and water wells independently. This has produced a zero-kilometer solidarity agriculture in which mass production has been abandoned to enjoy a local economy in which producers and citizens contribute to each other in order to revive the market and local agriculture, avoiding being subject to international logic in which big companies impose quantities, pesticides and any type of input for large-scale production.
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© Claudio Menna 2021. All righs are reserved