«Sicilian history is a history of defeats: defeats of reason, defeats of reasonable men. My own is also a story of defeats — or, more precisely, of disappointments, hence my skepticism: which is not, in fact, the acceptance of defeat, but a margin of safety, of elasticity, through which defeat — already foreseen, already reasoned — does not become final and fatal. Skepticism is healthy. It’s the best antidote to fanaticism. It keeps us from embracing ideas, beliefs, and hopes with that dangerous certainty that ends up killing both others’ freedom and our own.»*
Palermo is a receptacle of missed opportunities, of failures. Palermo is a wonderful city—in potential.
It overwhelms you; you endure it like the person you once loved and long to divorce, yet you can’t bring yourself to sign the papers. It seduces you and drags you under.
Knowing she’s cruel isn’t enough.
The more I try to distance myself and take root elsewhere, the more my camera and I find ourselves— by fate or mockery — retracing her streets, her scents, her blinding light, her stark shadows.
There’s no guilt in my escape, but there is anger — so there is love. And so I return and photograph for as long as I can hold my breath: I test the endurance of my lungs and move through Palermo without breathing, sniffing and observing, devouring miles with an ever-stronger urge to scream.
Palermo Imploded is a photographic project divided into ten chapters, a collection of stories; a series of X-rays that attempt to reveal the pauses between what we’re used to seeing and what we’d rather pretend not to see.
It’s an attempt to recover a lost relationship with a city—my city— “a mother in birth and a stepmother in will.”***
The red thread running through the chapters is Palermo itself, with its contradictions, and mine in relation to its places: my conflict between hope and black mistrust. Different symptoms of the same disease.
I Coast to coast, lato A
II Coast to coast, lato B
III Via della Libertà – Via Ruggiero Settimo – Via Maqueda
IV Via Vittorio Emanuele
V Viale Lazio – Via Montepellegrino
VI Fiera del Mediterraneo
VII Parco della Favorita
VIII Ex Stabilimento Tessile Gulì
IX Munnizza
X Padri pii
* Leonardo Sciascia, La Sicilia come metafora, intervista di Marcelle Padovani, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano 1979, p. 6.
** Citazione libera da un intervento di Ferdinando Scianna.
*** Giacomo Leopardi, La ginestra o il fiore del deserto, in “Leopardi poesie e opere vol. 1”, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano 1987, p. 127.