Stwill be a case, but it is called avenue of the Resistance the street in the notorious northern suburb of Naples where the Jesuits have been offering cultural and professional training for thirty years in the Centro Hurtado. You get there from the dilapidated Secondigliano, in the distance you see the Vele di Scampia not yet demolisheda monument to degradation that has become an unbearable commonplace for the residents of the eighth Municipality who even find themselves in the way of the tourist safaris of Gomorrah fans. But then here, al Hurtado Centeryou find yourself a rough Milanese, not at all compliant with the youthful, fashionable scugnizza rhetoric of the TV serieswho came to take bursts of photographs as an artist, capable of staring into your eyes, understanding you and aiming at the depths of your humanity.
Scampia’s real smile
It’s terrible, Oliviero Toscani: «Take away all those frills, hide lacquered nails, remove the piercings, erase the lip contour… Come back to yourself!».
For all of them the same white shirt as the background cloth, no lights, no superfluous details. They are precocious adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19, kids of life who have to grow up early in these parts, enlisted in the project “All the same song’ ‘e criature“. The most difficult thing is to extract one by one, one by one, the authenticity of the smile. To make it ithe banner of the rebirth of Scampia to which many work – street volunteers, local authorities, cultural associations, businesses, the Federico II university which has just inaugurated a faculty of nursing medicine in place of the Vela H – but of which only its very young inhabitants can become the keepers.
Oliviero Toscani during the shooting for the project “Tutt’eguale song’ ‘e criature”.
It would seem sufficient to announce the arrival of the famous photographer, spread the word in the middle schools named after Ilaria Alpi and Carlo Levi, invite the frequenters of the judo gym founded by ‘o maè Giovanni Maddaloni, make the perspective of end up immortalized on the large canvases of twenty meters by ten that will cover the scaffolding of the buildings destined for energy redevelopment… Instead it is not enough to set up the virtuous synergy between a sponsor, the Smean Energy consortium, and the Silvia Ruotolo Foundation created to counter the mafia subculture since childhood.
The Resistance passes through women
Much more is needed if you really want to portray a possible Resistance through the faces of its very young protagonists. We need women, the women of Scampia. Volunteers, mothers, grandmothers. Even just obtaining the release required by law to reproduce the image of minors, with the consent signed by their parents, becomes a complicated matter if father and mother are both in prison. Oliviero Toscani and his collaborators had to deal with it. Often the protection remains in the hands of the grandmothers, in fact, and the signature is not at all obvious. It becomes essential, then, to enter into a relationship with those who are committed to being present day by day, side by side, within the most difficult realities which unfortunately remain the norm. like theDream Team Association which provides women with an anti-violence garrison and has promoted a women’s soccer team. Or like the constant presence in the area of Patrizia Palumbo, referent of Freethe association for legality founded by Don Luigi Ciotti, which is here entitled to the memory of Antonio Landieri, an innocent victim of the Camorra.
The same Alexandra Clementfounder and president of the Silvia Ruotolo Foundation promoter of the shooting of Oliviero Toscani, experienced firsthand the trauma of a violated childhood. She was only 10 years old when her mother, teacher Silvia Ruotolo, was killed on the street in 1997 by a bullet to the temple, just because she had the bad luck of being in the middle of a shootout between rival Camorra gangs. As an adult, who became a lawyer, Alessandra Clemente reacted by making education to legality, i.e. the repudiation of family-mafia ties, his life project. She was councilor for young people of the Municipality of Naples and now she continues to meet the girls and boys who will have to undertake the path of social redemption.
A redemption that almost always involves moments of disobedience, the revolt against the dominant culture in the neighborhood. Where women stop being submissive to the clan when their men end up behind bars, perhaps with prison sentences of twenty or thirty years, and then it’s really only up to them to take courage and show their children the possibility of a destiny alternative.
The photographer with teachers, volunteers and children at the Hurtado center in Scampia.
Cultivate self-esteem
It is darned difficult to find yourself in the middle of two opposing needs: do not betray or abandon the fathers of their children locked up in Poggioreale, keep alive that emotional bond with the absent dad that the kids can’t do without; and at the same time to ensure that this does not lead to a fate marked in deviance for them. Taking charge, being in the middle, exercising the vocation of caring, cultivating self-esteem, educating themselves and their daughters first to respect female dignity. Always very tiring, even more so if you live in Scampia, Secondigliano or Ponticelli. For this there are schools, reception centers, gyms, tailors, laboratories. Children need to be encouraged to go there, exercising discreet, loving but tenacious supervision. Why in the dark basements of the barracks the alternative choice of easy drug dealing is always lurking.
Oliviero Toscani, welcoming his “subjects” to Hurtado Center of viale della Resistenza, with all these difficulties he knows very well that he has to try his hand. He’s not the type to settle for an image retouch. In his communication for commercial purposes, as well as in his numerous international projects for social purposes, he has never censored the ugly, the violent, the tragic to safeguard aesthetics.
Provoke them, to make them react
Here in Scampia, however, imagining the sheets of faces that will envelop the blocks of flats, he decides that his task is to extract from everyone’s depths the smile of the new vitality which he offers them access to. Teenagers are displaced, in the preparation for the portrait, a real psychological technique without which photographing would only be lazy, trivial, false posing. So Toscani curses against the youthful scourge of social media, he provokes them, shouts “long live Inter” to the numerous male Neapolitan fans named Diego and “enough with the Ferragnez” to stereotypical females.
Here they are, finally reacting and telling each other. Claudia who wants to become a surgeon in Scampia. Alessia who had for uncle Pino Daniele and wants to be a dancer. Marianna who imagines herself already a criminologist and Francesca, who studies at the Orientale, a diplomat. Mashia intends to graduate as a nurse in the new neighborhood university.
Mattia, needless to say, an aspiring Napoli player. Ilaria kick boxing champion. Then there’s Raffaella who is the niece of Camorra victim Antonio Landieri and wants to be a research scientist; while the fourteen-year-old Federica dreams of organizing expeditions to uninhabited places at the Polo where man can live in the future. They smile, click. Scampia is not irredeemable. Thanks to them, even here it will be possible to live well in the future.
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED