Stanze, 2010, 60’
GAMeC, Italia. www.gamec.it
The litmus test of 20th-century Italy, rooms inhabited not only by people but also stories that become interwoven with each other and merge history with courses, recourses and escape routes: the barracks in Via Asti serve as a synecdoche for the social problems that continue to cross the Italian peninsula. Established under Fascism in the age of colonial expansion to Africa, the barracks became the headquarters of the National Republican Guard, and it was here that partisan prisoners were tortured and shot. In symbolic retaliation, following the end of the Second World War a trial held in 1946 condemned a number of Fascists who had worked in Via Asti. Today the barracks have been turned into accommodation for Somali political refugees, and they are the leading players and narrators of our story. The rooms that the De Serio brothers illustrate in a work marked by compelling social significance are those of the barracks as a space, but above all those of space-memory and space-poetry. The narration is not linear and instead unfolds in stories and fragments. As the video proceeds, the roles are doubled and the refugees themselves become the leading players in the 1946 trial of the Fascists, adapting archival material about the trials of the members of the National Republican Guard, and thus tracing a parallel between the colonial past and today’s migratory exile.
If on an aesthetic level the word rooms refers to the parts of larger composition, the work of the De Serio Brothers is a room of rooms, a recited poem. The leading players recount their experience of travelling to Italy, their hopes and expectations frustrated by the difficulty of relocating to this new setting. They do this with the language of Somali poetry, used as an instrument of public and political debate before an official alphabet was introduced in the Seventies. This choice states the social commitment of the work, which aims to open a window of reflection on Italy’s culture and immigration policies. The spectator is the counterpart in a possible public debate opened by the refugees’ words. With this film, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio give the floor to Somali refugees, giving them a chance to tell their stories and recount their experiences. This is a significant act that goes against the prevailing attitude tending to silence and sideline migrants, placing them all in that sweeping macro-category dubbed “immigrants” or “non-Europeans”.
The cinematographic language is reduced to essentials: the camera is fixed in space, the transition from shadows to light marks the beginning and end of each story, also serving as the transition to a new space in the barracks. The absence of movement focuses the viewers’ attention on the words of the leading players, which echo in the solitude of the rooms and reflect the condition of those who undergo the experience of forced migration. The tenses of past, present and future are interwoven and overlap in the narrations: the time past of the history of Italy, but also the time past of the refugees’ life before their journey and the very experience of that voyage; time present filled with frustration, disappointment and the difficulties encountered in this new setting; and time future, imagined not as an escape route but an opportunity for change.
Stanze proceeds by symbolic and physical planes, from hallways to cellars, through chains of images stitched by the twisted thread of time, and through lights that intensify to reveal the dramatic physicality of shadow-people and then fade away, lowering the curtain of forgetfulness and indifference that trains our gaze.
By Sara Fumagalli and Stefano Raimondi
The twins Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio (Turin, 1978) have worked together since 1999. With their work they seek to deepen current issues as immigration, social disadvantage and multiculturalism, giving voice to those who often find themselves on the margins of society.
www.gmdeserio.com