2023-09-24 07:33:14
Time.news – After Bologna, Rome, Naples, Bergamo, Reggio Emilia, Mantua, but also Montreal and other cities in Germany, Holland and soon Switzerland, the exhibition “The island of the arrusi” by the Piacenza photographer Luana Rigolli, Roman by adoption, is open in Cefalù at the Caffe literary Galleria until 8 October, a date for which the twenty-day extension has already been decided due to the high interest aroused.
Cefalù hosts part of the photographic repertoire that the artist collected in a self-published book of the same name on the confinement in the Tremiti islands of forty-five homosexuals all from Catania who in 1939, due to the fierce homophobic repression unleashed by the police commissioner of the time, they were isolated for political reasons, in reality for reasons linked to the prevailing fascist belief in the “defense of the race”.
The facts were recalled for the first time by Giuseppe Provenza’s Cefalù art gallery itself on the occasion of Remembrance Day in 2021, when due to the pandemic there was only a live streaming which took inspiration from the book “The City and the Island” (released in 2006 by Donzelli and republished last year) by Tommaso Giartosio and Gianfranco Goretti which reconstruct the story which is still little known today. The Palermo artist Pupi Fuschi participated in the event by drawing some of the faces of the prisoners live.
“In July of the same year – Provenza, owner of the gallery, tells Time.news – we contacted the photographer Luana Rigolli who had done a great deal of work on the case and we set up an exhibition of photos, “Up to confinement”, with a vernissage consisting of a performance by the puppeteer Angelo Sicilia which represented the moment in which the commissioner calls by name one by one the homosexuals destined for prisonthe island of San Domino in the Tremiti. After Rigolli undertook to self-produce her book, we decided on a new exhibition, which opened on 16 September and was of such interest that all its copies were sold.”
The forty-year-old photographer with a Sicilian mother decided to finance her work entirely herself, which cost eleven thousand euros, after having tried to sell the photos to Italian magazines for two years without even receiving a response. “In the suspicion – she tells Time.news – that not even the publishers would respond to me, I decided to do everything myself by printing four hundred copies. Luckily abroad, where the interest in this page of fascist history is much stronger, things went differently, so much so that in Canada I sold the photos to three magazines and I had an exhibition financed which if it is now traveling in Italy and why did they do everything, otherwise it would be difficult to even hold exhibitions in our Village”.
Luana Rigolli, a traveling photographer attracted by remote and unusual places, came to know the case of the “arrusi” (according to the Catanese expression with which gays are called) by reading the book by Giartosio and Goretti. “I dedicated myself to it with commitment, going to the Central State Archives and photographing all the faces taken from the biographical cards, the letters requesting mercy from the prisoners to the king and the minister, the police reports against them. I went to Tremiti where I photographed what remains of the places of confinement and then in Catania in the gay meeting places, in the men-only ballroom which today is a subdued center”.
The book, whose cover reproduces chromatically and graphically the map of permanence of the confined, integrates that of Giartosio and Goretti and is given a title, “The island of the arrusi”, which underlies not Sicily but the Tremiti. Where, according to some news reports, homosexuals from Catania were able to move freely without having to hide anymore.
When the fortress of San Domino was used by the government to imprison real political prisoners, homosexuals were sent home and it was in Catania that the authors of “The city and the island” tracked down two of them and collected their testimonies and confidences. Rigolli’s exhibition includes thirty large framed photos of places, judicial decisions, letters, and forty-five reproductions of the faces of the prisoners as shown in their files. In Cefalù, due to space problems, the kit is smaller, but it ensures a conscious and exhaustive understanding of the facts told through images. “We cannot remain passive – says Giuseppe Provenza – in the face of events that have marked our time and which have remained almost unexplored. Many of these people, even homosexual women, ended up in mental hospitals because they were considered genetically unhealthy. The exhibition serves to keep alive not only the memory but also the historical attention”.
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