Palermo, portrait of a city without limits
E 'as I mention below, look, evaluate, live to see: there is no life in Palermo. There is no life or creative thinking, there is no criticism or review, only complaints. Perennial moans of a city ill. In Palermo, in fact, there are only economic activities of mere physiological specificity. This city is like a biological organism that consumes food and energy expelling its product waste. Here it is not produced nor creating anything. No capital gains. No thought. No perceived quality.
Palermo is a city of gray, dirt, noise, a city stratified social hypocrisy and management. A city made of "in house" and "out." A city where public space is no man's land. A land of no good to park cars, garbage bins, for the things you do not keep at home.
A city consists of a communal society and passive, a city full of people conformist, approved and silent, a city of old and people born old. A city where people want to see her as much as possible for approved and perhaps the fear of inability to know to run their own originality. Here, if you're different, but only just a little, you're "crazy" and "eccentric", was also not put the tie. A city where everyone is so-so.
A city made, broadly, the same buildings that are located on the outskirts of Soviet cities that we think without horror realize that we live in it. A city made of concrete but in the periphery of invasive scale of the territory. A city of poor people of resources, such as may, will make its world obviously bad, facendoselo pleasure.
Palermo is now a sort of large slums / shanty towns, but of cement concrete with lifts and the smell of dampness and mold, cement and plaster falling.
A city dirty and ugly, like an old maid, puts on makeup to appear, then the powder and paints her eyebrows. And you see around.
A city of people gathered, piled, who firmly believes in its own defined by nobilitas an important and constant phenomenon of mutual satisfaction and generational general.
A city of people yelling when he speaks, people talk about the raucous, vulgar and aggressive. Of people who want to see her aggressive and speaks in dialect. A dialect from the aggressive tone, per se, a language, in fact, aggressive. The first things you learn as children in public schools are aggressive phrases, phrases of a vulgar and disruptive aggression of a paradoxical if not spectacular, and which, interpreted, allow you to find the origins of a company, and lived at the scale of decades allow us to understand where this company and this city are now. Probably this aggression
shown through the language he uses is the same as the organized crime, better known as the Mafia, is probably the same for emulation, it is the manner and language.
A chaotic city of anarchy and uncivilized without respect. A society and a city that does not have the characteristics of a variety of different companies. A city of "poor" and "rich", this is limited and basic criterion of social differentiation. But in this place and in this society where poverty is a poverty without any dignity, what is the supposed "wealth"? What actually are "rich" who, here, passing through them.
I am to mind a joke that a friend and fellow architect, also said Iranian ten or more years ago: "I move to California," said Oh, good heavens, why? - answered because there is no culture here in Palermo and economy and is an architect can work there (he graduated recently too) .- And I asked him to start, and a fairly lucrative trade in his city ..... I said exactly this: I go away because I can do business anywhere in the future, then I would not want my son asked me "dad .. because you were so fool to leave Iran to stay in Palermo ?"....
is a city that pretends calling card number "grandeur" historicized and Polyphemus the now legendary: the tourists are taken around the definition of "Conca d'oro", the stories of Arab Palermo always denied and a arabitudine that however is generally associated with a disparaging tone and ruling by the inhabitants. When it comes to Los Angeles, Dubai or other similar cities is not associated with the concept of "walk" to "take a walk" and I wonder, what exactly is the added value of making "two steps" in any the road to Palermo? I wonder because frankly I find it hard to do it and propose it.
Why do not I can think of nothing more than background noise, dirt everywhere and the most varied types, smells, absolute disorder in all things and in short, not because I can think while moving in public space are right in that no man's land that no one hears or perceives as his own, that no one respects and care and in which no one recognizes. The color of this no man's land is gray dirt and dust. The streets are gray, gray are the facades of buildings, cars are always dirty gray, gray are the faces of people, dirty gray are the signs of the shops, the horizon is gray cement and iron, which closes the horizon on the sea of this city.
Palermo is a city without limits, then without perspective, this statement may have a double meaning, rhetorical or real. Yes, because Palermo is a city on the sea which has always denied the sea, in fact the entire coast from the outskirts of Palermo at the end of the city is forbidden or inaccessible, hidden or unpleasant environment for the level of corruption all too evident. In Palermo, where they want to dispose of a thing is said to "throw overboard": here the sea is the landfill, the synthesis and the mother of all no man's land.
So the sea along the coastline, the coast, also known as "water front" in a phrase that both international and makes appeals to architects and planners to suggest appropriate strategies for the city to places with a different experience and consideration the common good and the relationship with public spaces. Of course, "Water Front" is a word that sounds good, well that is rolled between the tongue and palate, but the reality of things here there is only the "Front".
This front, the coast in fact, a physical barrier is present almost everywhere by the sea. Gates, walls, piles of rubble, garbage dumps and sewers. The port is armored and militarized, the military ask you if you go where you go. Maybe you can and maybe you can not get to "see" the ships ..... however there are soldiers and bored with their weapons of war that we scrutinize turning his head as if I were a cigarette smuggler.
This front, the coast in fact, a physical barrier is present almost everywhere by the sea. Gates, walls, piles of rubble, garbage dumps and sewers. The port is armored and militarized, the military ask you if you go where you go. Maybe you can and maybe you can not get to "see" the ships ..... however there are soldiers and bored with their weapons of war that we scrutinize turning his head as if I were a cigarette smuggler.
But then because there are soldiers with machine guns at the port? Ah, yes! I remember now! Bin Laden, bombings, terrorism, harbor the same strategic goal .... but then why there are soldiers guarding the port of Lipari Island or Female? because they are strategic objectives of terrorism, someone will answer ... but even there in the summer there is a lot of people! The truth is that Palermo, despite the great arias from choirs around the proposed institutional, is a provincial town where the most of the bombs if the Sicilians put yourself together to settle their accounts. Bin Laden, if he wants to make noise, make a bomb or Barcelona Rabat, Algiers or Tunis, perhaps in Rome, and if you ask why does a bell'attentato in Palermo, perhaps even the port, sends you to hell. Perhaps to internationalize, paradoxically serve a bell'attentato by international terrorism, the serious one of course .... great stuff ...... but it will not (fortunatamente. ...... - I write because there will always be stupid when you read the text might accuse me of anything -).
The attack will be there because I believe that the image of Sicily abroad is closely linked to the cannoli, and their size, rather than other things of strategic interest, recently there was also a sort of urban-country festival centered on a competition which celebrates those who could eat cannoli. We do not need to defend the borders with weapons, just politics and the local approach to anything to discourage the invasions and attacks.
The port is great, almost like the whole city. Vacuum, industrial, inaccessible and daunting. Foreclosure, rather than exclusive. Queata city noise, noise, dust, urban motorways and barriers everywhere. Muri undone, unmade roads, windows broken, blind street in an urban labyrinth where the rounds, it seems to be in a video game, because in the video game look and look for the "enemy", what you have in front, and on the micro-battle face, not ever raise his eyes to look around. Also, precisely because there is nothing to look around.
Anywhere in the city are always and only surrounded by walls and buildings and when you get there are limits to the gates before the sea. No horizon.
Frankly Palermo is a city ugly, dirty and sad and I find it hard to invite someone to come here to seek the welfare conditions. Conversely it is easy to characterize precisely all that discomfort. I do not write this for pessimism and depressed mood, but awareness of the local reality and do not: in any urban location, metropolitan, provincial or isolated, there are pros and cons to the choice of living in a context. The city of Palermo offers no benefit to me to find and they fall in the equilibrium conditions a contemporary metropolis.
Perhaps for the simple fact that Palermo is not the metropolis "Mediterranean" which is touted by the institutions, but a messy and chaotic urban area, run to the daily lives and personalities, as the workshop of the angle of the road. And it is evident to everyone the difference between the shop and a mall. I do not take this the topic of cultural and related to their condition that should be a contemporary city because we would go into a territory with no hope and no real evidence which had not drawn on maps. In fact, Hic Sunt Leones *.
images that represent my review of the photographs are, and because the photographs have a connotation of objectivity, they say, in principle, as it is. Were carried out between 2002 and 2004 during the documentary for the French publisher "Actes Sud" and "La Repubblica". Most of them I have made with a specific awareness and in particular social-weather: in fact been carried out only on Sundays, between 12 and three in the afternoon, during and at day time, but flat gray and bright usually with high clouds and without shadows. On Sunday, at certain times the apparent lack of dynamism and degree of vegetative survival of this social organism that is the city of Palermo, a city, despite everything. In this condition, as it turns out that part of town that is a public good, and therefore any public area broadly, will turn into reality in a state "border-line" border populated by stray dogs (big ones, but usually harmless ) and wandering, some crazy, Jehovah's Witnesses in pairs and their folders, other characters, as they say the snails, "come out when it rains." However
recommend visiting Palermo on the night, the rampant ugliness, dirt-invasive, are less obvious.
* Hic sunt leones is a Latin phrase that translates as "Q ui there are lions" . Was often marked on maps drawn by the African Middle Ages to the sixteenth century to describe the unknown and possibly hostile territories.
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