Urbanautica

LEARNING FROM PALERMO

by Steve Bisson

© Sandro Scalia, view of Palermo

I thank Sebastiano Raimondo for the book "Palermo Periferie" which reports a visual investigation on the Sicilian city. The works of established photographers such as Gabriele Basilico, Guido Guidi, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Sandro Scalia, Daniele Tartaglia, Stefan Koppelkamm, and Raimondo himself intersect with those no less significant than the students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo; young and attentive observers. Motivations and meaning also find space in the texts that accompany the reading. Valtorta's words recall the genesis of care for the landscape (and therefore the complexity of the urban phenomenon) precisely in its sudden and invasive transformations. An attempt to measure or trace a "metron" in the post-war Italian evaporation of settlements. And this is still true today as the students' works testify. It's about a need to mend a tear, or rather a relationship with reality that seems to run on its own. By orienting oneself in the suburbs, the edges of the urban scrub, where the contours fade by definition, and in the forgotten, abandoned, secondary plots that affect the wrecks of history.

© Nicola di Giorgio, Social housing in Corso Pisani, 2018

I think there is a value in returning the perspective to one's territory, and not necessarily chasing the global void. Trying to trace an ontological-social dimension, a historical nature in that indistinct building magma well represented in an overview by Stefan Koppelkamm.

© Stefan Koppelkamm, View of the city from Monte Pellegrino, 2017

The concept of threshold that we find in Raimondo's intentions expressed in objectifying a window, a door, a neighborhood is a mirror that "honors the finite" to use a category of Hegel and seeks geometries in perception. Indispensable for setting references. And it is no coincidence that it occurs in an era often defined as a liquid, I would dare to say now volatile, gaseous, ethereal. Boneless in some way.

© Sebastiano Raimondo, dens and residences seized from mafia bosses, neighborhood Uditore, 2018

The book opens with a couple of zenith views by the student Luca Lombardo that undoubtedly manifest an antagonistic division of space, an odd and pervasive struggle in the production of space. Sandro Scalia's shots give the way of speculative fallout and greedy private calculation at the expense of the environment. The landscape does not lie. It tells us who we are today and maybe who we were. The photograph also shows what it is and shouldn't be when it doesn't chase butterflies.

© Luca Lombardo, 2019

© Sandro Scalia, Pizzo Sella, view on the city, 2018

© Guido Guidi, via Bernardino Maschel, neighborhood Tommaso Natale, 1997

© Guido Guidi, via Bernardino Maschel, neighborhood Tommaso Natale, 1997

© Daniele Tartaglia, Sferracavallo, view on Barcarello, 2019

On the other hand, the future remains somewhat uncertain, although the physics of inertia speak clearly. Photography can then act as a form of friction or a short cognitive short circuit. A moment that can also be extended with some stratagem, as Guidi has shown us in his repeated forays. However, static images do not exist because all are historicized, like the squares invaded by cars that turn into parking lots in the eyes of Gabriele Basilico. Thus the periphery is a frontier place where the ancient relationship between natural macrocosm and social microcosm is consumed and revealed.

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