The memory of landscapes

This article was originally published in Domus 963 / November 2012

What memories do places retain of the things that happened in them? Try going to Quarto, near Genoa, to see the rocks from which Garibaldi's thousand Red Shirts set sail on their great adventure; or to Via Caetani, in Rome, where the dead body of the politician Aldo Moro was found abandoned in the boot of a car. In both places there is a plaque, a monument, an object and an inscription, to record what happened on that spot, years, decades, a century ago. Are these places impervious to memory, or do they keep it as a part of their identity?

It is a question hard to answer, yet it needs to be asked when looking at these photographs by Tommaso Bonaventura and Alessandro Imbriaco, realised for the research project curated by Fabio Severo. They represent places where a Mafia-style crime was committed — hence the title of the project, Corpi di Reato ("Corpora Delicti"). It could be a murder, building speculation, a house where a criminal at large has lived, or one still inhabited by a mobster; a whole suburb with a clan of gangsters ensconced in it; or courtrooms, archives of court cases, bunkers, legal evidence, statues of slain judges. These places, spaces and buildings, framed by the lens of Bonaventura and Imbriaco, are intended to indicate not just a criminal act, but also a visual presence: the Mafia is here, all around us. At one time, the photographs that portrayed this criminal association represented the murders of eminent figures and Sicilian landscapes: old-fashioned images that confirmed clichés; photographs of customs and traditions, sedimented in the eyes of the whole country. But then, after the slaughters it wrought during the 1990s, the Mafia emerged from its customary landscape of palm trees, olive groves, cliffs, dry-stone walls, donkeys, cloth caps, moustachioed men, black-clad women, portraits of criminal absconders, bandits and so on, and moved into a sort of invisibility.

As Fabio Severo says, this type of criminality — but other similar organisations too — has become a scattered, multiform reality. After changing face, it has become steadily more integrated into the political and economic landscape of Italy. Having explored this aspect, Bonaventura and Imbriaco came to the conclusion that they could — and should — shift their attention to the corpora delicti: landscapes and places. They rightly assume that these must have retained a memory, or at least some visible trace, of the criminal acts perpetrated in them. They ventured into a shadowy zone, where things appear in their transitoriness, ambivalence and ambiguity. They delved into a landscape that is inhabited by all of us, in order to extract visions of what happened and still happens there.

Thus we are shown a playground in Milan's suburbs, a space where children can run around happily, jumping on and off seesaws and slides, with neither they nor their parents knowing that buried beneath that place is toxic waste or the remains of Mafia-style building speculation. Or concrete plinths at the bottom of a valley, solitary sentries recording a clan's attempt to erect an unauthorised building, now under distraint pending judicial investigation. What seems to be a natural spot — a riverbed — is disfigured by piers that would have supported a road.

If you look carefully at the places captured by the lens of these two photographers, be it a quarry, an apartment building, a group of high-rises, a middle-class home, a street, a town, an isolated farmhouse, a historic monument, you realise that what they are intended to seize and submit to our visual scrutiny are indeed "bodies". Not, of course, in flesh and bones, but composed of inert matter: gravel, earth, cement, glass or whatever. They are living — or dying — parts of our landscape that are the country's real body: its physical form as Pier Paolo Pasolini understood it. As a poet, he described Italy as a living body, a throbbing reality of towns perched on hilltops, cultivated fields, tenements on the edge of the city, minute soccer fields, open spaces along rivers, sandy banks and beaches. Italy is first and foremost its landscape. Lovely or ugly as it may be, it doesn't matter. It is a living organism, mangled over the past century and a half by the rapacious and virulent actions of builders, speculators, gangsters, criminals, Mafiosi and Camorra racketeers.

Bonaventura and Imbriaco unreel this landscape before our astonished eyes: country lanes, estuaries, seashores, promontories, crags, mountains, cultivated fields, council rooms, records offices, entrances to public buildings, courtrooms, courtyards, unauthorised constructions, temporary buildings, shacks, motorway intersections, guardhouses, bars, canteens and conference rooms. In each of these spaces — whether open or closed — something happened that concerns, questions and disturbs us. And yet all these images convey a sense of normality.

The shots are anonymous. Even if in every photo one perceives a determination to look, and thus to show, to an extent that goes beyond the image itself, normality seems to dominate. But these images are question marks. We feel interrogated by this everyday normality. Do you know what happened here? Who lived in that shack? Who lives in that building? Who uses this road every day? The invisibility of places and actions is transformed into a kind of visual archaeology that gradually strikes and disturbs us as we stare at the snapshots.

Isn't that a quiet suburban road just like the one where I live? And those houses, haven't I seen them before? Didn't I take my son to a playground like that one? Recognising the places and spaces depicted as part of our landscape relieves the photograph of its purpose as a mere document and rings an alarm bell, shaking us out of our indifference and acquiescence. The Mafia issue can be photographed like this, by giving shape to the "grey zone", as Primo Levi called it, that surrounds us and in which, like it or not, we are immersed. The invisible has suddenly become visible, and all of us are there, in those photos, in that landscape. Just look. Marco Belpoliti, essayist and writer