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 long road home.
[ongoing project 2015/21]
La letteratura medica indica che almeno il 30-40% dei bambini con la sindrome di CHARGE non supera i cinque anni di vita. Queste percentuali si riferiscono a delle forme estremamente gravi di CHARGE. Superata la prima infanzia, la mortalità dei pazienti affetti rimane comunque più alta rispetto a quella di bambini con altre patologie. La Sindrome o Associazione CHARGE è una patologia rara che può colpire diverse parti del corpo e viene riconosciuta come una delle maggiori cause di cecità e sordità.
La parola “CHARGE” corrisponde all’acronimo delle più comuni caratteristiche di questa malattia:
C = Coloboma
H = Heart defects (difetti cardiaci)
A = Atresia of the Choanae (atresia delle coane)
R = Retardation of growth and developmental delay (ritardo della crescita e dello sviluppo)
G = Genital anomalies (malformazioni dei genitali)
E = Ear anomalies (malformazioni dell'orecchio )
For L. present is an open bag wearing always with herself, a drawer she opens many daily times, when she’s sad and alone, from which she gets moments and remembrances remained clearly in her memory. Past is for L. a wealth of experiences, motivation to do more and more, always better in a present done of troubles. Her personal road she goes through her daily life is difficult, often in climb and full of difficulties, but L. loves climbing herself on the sharp mountains, extricating in the urban caos, to be independent in spite of everything.
Every new experience is a new conquest, a new package of memories to place in a close bag, in her personal drawer.
L. is born with the C.H.A.R.G.E. syndrome, she’s blind. She doesn’t know what red. green or blue are, but she loves to sit on a wood bench (in the garden of the Institute for people with visual and psyco-physical diseases where she’s a guest) listening the sound of wind which moves waving branches and leaves, breathing essence of present is a way to be happy for her She loves sea, even if she never see it, and she loves swim free, without restrictions and limits of mental and architectural hindrance she hits everyday on her path.
For L. present is a continual transformation to evolve herself in the woman she dreams to be.
What she doesn't want to brood in her mew life are
few thing left behind,
memories and flash back from her past.
© CLAUDIO MENNA 2021. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED