A beautiful story of love and resistance, written by Giovanna Pignataro and illustrated by the wonderful drawings of Tiziano Squillace. It is the history of the association, Who Roma and … who not, published by Marotta & Cafiero.
Who Roma and … who not, since 2002, has gone through the most significant stages in the social history of Scampia, bringing together people and ideas, flavors, knowledge and cultures, using the hands, the head, the heart, unhinging the very concept of the periphery which has become a center of cultural, artistic and economic production. A project that puts into practice pedagogical, social and intercultural interventions together with the Roma and Italian communities in the Scampia district. A path that continues to live and move forward like relationships and doing together that unite women, children, men and create communities, dreams and visions.
It all starts with an important political act: “The construction with the Roma inhabitants of a shack ‘abusive’ – as they tell on the website www.chiromechino.it – in an ‘abusive’ camp with the aim of making it a public laboratory space and meeting place for Roma, gagiò, children, young people and adults. In the shack, called Scola Jungla from girls and boys, for many years, with enormous difficulty, first of all the relationships between people, inhabitants of the neighborhood and the city have been consolidated, and an attempt has been made to build favorable conditions for participation, activating intercultural, creative and of active citizenship that still continue today even if the shack is no longer there, helping to open important reflections with the Roma on the theme of living and overcoming the fields and on the creative redevelopment of public space from below. The shack, together with other historic spaces in the neighborhood, was a real outpost and center of resistance against dehumanization, a space of struggle for the right to a dignified existence of thousands of people forced to live on the margins. The public assemblies that over the years have involved the members of the various Roma community together with the non-Roma of Naples and Italy, they have made a border area considered a minority and marginal, a Roma camp, by definition excluded from the majority circuits, a nerve center for innovative designs, and have been a concrete model of participatory processes for true emancipation and social liberation and the restoration of citizenship rights. “
The name of the association, in addition to signifying belonging, and not, to the Roma ethnic group, in Neapolitan stands for “Who sleeps and… who doesn’t”, and to wake up you need to know the other in us. And reading this book is a first step towards understanding ourselves and others, because certain paths are not only possible but necessary.