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
The World is blind.
According to WHO, almost 285 million people suffer of visual impairment, including blindness and low vision 39 million to 246 million. This report is an investigation of the everyday life of people with visual impairment in the only structure in Italy dedicated to learning the necessary domestic and urban autonomy.
In Italy there were different structures used to accommodate young people and adults with visual impairment, whose purpose was to teach them full autonomy in their lives.
Today, after the closing of all facilities, in Italy Paolo Colosimo Institute of Naples is the only still active where people converge from every region of the country.
The need to address this structure takes guests to live part of the day in public areas, turning them into a big sui generis family. This is how ties and moments of sharing grow.
The evolution of these dynamics leads them to an original condition of forced companionship inside the Institute, to a different relationship out of the building, in the real life made of comrades, friends, and lovers.
I decided to start this report in the end of 2014, driven by the need to investigate and inform me about the daily life of those who are suffering from visual impairment, being me too almost blind due to a degenerative disease to my corneas. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary through images of real life, in order to demolish those preconceptions and prejudices about the limitations faced by the protagonists of this story.
My first question to them was:
"How do you live everyday yours life in this discomfort way?
And they told me: "The world is blind, not us!"
text and photos © Claudio Menna
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