2023-05-25 10:25:00
Time.news – An immersive installation with the large photographs hung on the theater boxesto recall the protest of the sheets being spread out from the balconies to say No to the mafia.
Shots of a furious black and white that on the stripped balustrades of what was once a nineteenth-century jewel, today acquire an even more important meaning: witnesses of pain and hope, of the wars between mafia clans, of unmentionables, of protagonists of a season which will arrive – but will not end – with the attacks in which the judges Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo, and Paolo Borsellino, and their respective escorts lost their lives.
© Tony Gentile
A shot by Tony Gentile on the day of the Capaci massacre
And of the revolt germinated from those massacres, from the revenge of the city that has started a path of reappropriation of spaces, physical but above all moral and ethical. Tony Gentile was then one of the young news photographers: since the 1980s – his beginnings – he documented crimes and arrests, inscrutable faces and well-known politicians, children in popular neighborhoods, demonstrations, everyday scenes, the first breaths of freedom and rebirth; and it was he who created the iconic image that tells in a glance, the great complicity and friendship between the judges Falcone and Borsellino, taken precisely 57 days before the Capaci massacre, almost a twist of fate given that exactly another 57 days passed before the attack in via D’Amelio.
The best known and unknown photographer in Italy
“Tony Gentile is the most famous photographer but paradoxically unknown for those in Italy who have seen one of his photographs so exceptional as to have become an icon of contemporary Italian history”, writes Ferdinando Scianna in the preface to the volume “Sicilia 1992. Light and memory” (Silvana editorial) which also contains the thirty selected shots for the exhibition “Tony Gentile. Light and memory” inaugurated on May 22 at the Teatro Garibaldi, which is thus returned to the community after four years of closure.
© Igor Petyx The Tony Gentile exhibition at the Garibaldi theater
And he is exhibiting for the first time the photograph of the judges – it has a date, 27 March 1992 – returned in the exact sequence of shots and treated with a digital “morphing” support (made by Luca Lo Iacono) which makes Paolo Borsellino’s smile appear lightly as he listens to the phrase, perhaps a joke, of his friend Giovanni Falcone. “A shot that everyone clings to because it is the symbol of a people’s desire for rebirth” says Tony Gentile recalling that the first publication was on July 20, 1992 in Il Messaggero.
But there are the others, memory archive, almost a Palermo family album: children playing in the dusty streets of Kalsa in the 1980s – the same neighborhood where judges Falcone and Borsellino grew up and where the theater is located, which comes back to life with this exhibition – a NoMafia human chain from 1993, Bruno Contrada and Giulio Andreotti , the murdered and the weeping of women. All shots and characters that seem to look at the spectator entering the theatre, asking an impossible why.
“I think there can’t be a more symbolic occasion to give this theater back its new life”, says the mayor Roberto Lagalla while the Councilor for Culture Giampiero Cannella is convinced that “the best way to fight the mafia is cultural intervention: this is the message of this exhibition”. For the regional councilor for cultural heritage, Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, “we see photos that turn back the clock and give courage, memory and light on a path of legality carried out by Falcone, Borsellino and all Sicilians”.
© Tony Gentile A shot by Tony Gentile taken from the book ‘War’
The exhibition, organized by the Le Vie dei Tesori Foundation and the Municipality of Palermo – Department of Culture on a project by the Tricoli Foundation, was created with the support of the ARS, the Regional Department of Cultural Heritage, Confcommercio Palermo, Cresm , of the Ersu.
“This theater reopens after four years with The Streets of Treasures which has made the reappropriation of spaces its mission – Laura Anello intervenes, president of the Le Vie dei Tesori Foundation – And we do it in this Kalsa where Falcone and Borsellino grew up”.
For the Tricoli Foundation “the photos of Tony Gentile for the new generations are a strong testimony of what the mafia barbarity of the 70s and 80s represented – says Fabio Tricoli – After this moment of reflection, the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Don Pino Puglisi awaits us: we will commit ourselves to spreading the culture of legality with new projects that may arrive in the suburbs”.
Inaugurated in the heart of ancient Kalsa in 1861 by the Hero of Two Worlds who harangued the crowd from this stage, the Teatro Garibaldi was closed for the first time until 1906, then it functioned as a cinema for thirty years (it was also called Araldo) then was closed again to reopen in the mid 1990s.
Story of an unstable theatre
Occupied in 2012 by show workers, it came cleared out and entrusted to Manifesta 12 during Palermo Italian Capital of Culture. It had been closed since 2019. The Municipality cleaned the spaces and emergency exits, and the tree in the adjacent garden was uprooted which had become unstable. A management committee has been appointed which will evaluate the proposals for shows to be hosted and plans are already being made to build a program. The exhibition will be open until 9 July, every day from Tuesday to Thursday from 11 to 19; from Friday to Sunday from 11 to 21.
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