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.
Things we left
behind. (ita/eng)
Queste, sono storie di resilienza e resistenza,
una resistenza al duro impatto che il Covid ha avuto sulla società e sui suoi elementi più deboli. Le storie proposte riguardano persone che hanno subito la pandemia non solo fisicamente, ma psicologicamente.
Storie di persone comuni dei segmenti più disparati della società, un neo papa' che ha contratto il covid dopo appena 3 mesi dalla nascita del figlio, una mamma single in quarantena con la figlia per oltre un mese a causa dei ritardi dell'asl per la verifica dei tamponi, un padre single con 3 figli abbandonati dall'ex moglie, un giovanissimo volontario che dal primo lock down ha aiutato centinaia di famiglie e durante la sua attività ha contratto il virus.
Gli strascichi del covid hanno avuto ripercussioni oltre che fisiche, anche e soprattutto psicologiche: come Francesco che fino a pochi mesi fa lavorava nel settore alberghiero, uno dei più colpiti dalla crisi, dopo 20 giorni di quarantena ed una sintomatologia lieve esce di casa per riassaporare l'aria di una libertà per un po' negata, e come se un interruttore venisse attivato inizia a mancargli l'aria, la dispnea dura ore, l'ansia che il covid abbia colpito duramente i polmoni era forte. Ma quando il saturimetro di una Farmacia in cui aveva chiesto soccorso segna una percentuale d'ossigeno di ben oltre il 98%, capisce di aver avuto (solo?!) un attacco di panico [...]
ENG Version. These are stories of resilience. Portraits of people who have dealt with covid, contagion, quarantine and disease, physical and psychological ones, economic and social too. These stories are stories like many others, these people are people like many others. These photos are their fears, their hopes, their resignation, their defeat but also their resistance, resilience and victory.
There's Francesco, 36 yo, he works in the hotel industry and like many is paying the economic consequences of the pandemic, of the lock down and the closure of some work activities. "I contracted covid in the second wave, in late September. I have quarantined in my room without ever leaving. The symptoms were mild, but when I recovered and went out for the first time, I experienced a panic attack for the first time in my life. I thought it was the dyspnea resulting from the covid. I have found that many of my peers who have been infected are now subject to this type of psycho-physical consequences".
© Claudio Menna 2020. All righs are reserved