Genoa, the days of the G8 Coming to terms with violence
What is justice, how can one remain indifferent to abuses? Valerio Callieri’s questions in his “This is how the world belongs to us”
The image shows two contiguous surfaces, perpendicular to each other. The first, the largest, appears to be a large concrete wall, and is divided in half by a transversal line that separates the part in shadow from that in light: white from black, to summarize. The second, much smaller, is at the bottom of the image, and compared to the first, to what is assumed to be a wall, it can take on a double dimension: a flattened portion and in fact irrelevant as a minority, or a base that supports the entire construction.
Let’s talk about the cover of “This is how the world belongs to us. Genova 2001, Bolzaneto barracks “by Valerio Callieri (Feltrinelli, 112 pages, 12 euros), a cover that represents with extreme effectiveness the material of this exceptionally dense and unavoidable book: in the sense that it is almost a must accounts. Because the work of the Roman, which starts from his experience as a demonstrator during the G8 twenty years ago, shuns the most banal, unbearable and unrealistic visions of reality, those for which one can clearly distinguish, always and in any case and without the possibility of error who is right from who is wrong – white from black, to summarize -, and reality, yesterday and today, faces it in a problematic way.
Which is the least obvious (and at the same time most useful) that can be done. Especially when it is known that the risk of being confined to the minority portion of space, the one below, is concrete, and that there is the danger of being crushed and reduced to silence by those who have made the slogan “Who is not with us the manifesto of their existence is against us. Or their political fortune. Certain passages of “This is how the world belongs to us” leaves us astonished. For example, the one about the atrocious violence carried out by the police against a man weaker than the others, and the one about the attitude of law enforcement lawyers in court: «While I was recounting the events in Bolzaneto, some of them were smiling. They looked me in the face and smiled, I told about the beatings and smiled. (…) It was cold laughter. Aware. Bad ». But to limit the content only to the events of the G8 that took place in Italy, to the arrest of Callieri and to the abuses of which he was a victim and witness, to the trials that ensued, would do a huge wrong to the book, to the author and to the reader of the our review. Because such events are indeed at the center of the book, but on closer inspection they are a starting point, if not even a pretext, for asking the questions that have accompanied man since he has been a man. They are the “nocturnal questions of the mystery that we are”.
How is it possible to beat and continue to beat one’s fellow man even when he is now defenseless? How is it possible to laugh while doing it? “Under what circumstances would we be able to do this? If we had at hand a person who in turn tortured our son in front of us until he died, would we be able to do it? ». What does it entail, immediately and subsequently, for oneself and for others, to remain “firm in the face of a massacre”? What does “really” mean “justice”? «They are bissal questions – Callieri – who do not write from which it is good to let oneself be conquered. It allows us to dangerously lose our certainties. And to give the word to pain. After all, this is how the world belongs to us ».