Niside Panebianco, An Essential Condition

An Essential Condition

Niside Panebianco AAD Dissertation Studio 1

2020–21

Extracts from Niside Panebianco, An Essential Condition

Dissertation Studio 1 Another Place Tutor: Ektoras Arkomanis

School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2021

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II.

The Tenacity of the Fragile

In the current times of preponderant globalization, we are growing to forget our disposition for places. In a whirl of replicas, it can seem pretentious to have claims of authenticity and the word ‘local’ can ring hollow. Our sense of place becomes vague because everything we were once familiar with – the whole network of relations and stories – makes way for new systems of signification.

This situation could, at least in theory, catalyse a numbness towards sites in general – the end of a more traditional, concrete and intimate conception of them. To use Teti’s words, this sense of anostalgia would mean the bitter end of our feeling for a place. In reality, however, places and non-places are elusive poles, which overlap, oppose and evoke each other. In this context, the growth of localisms and the practice of nostalgia – not of a restorative, but of a constructive kind – may also be harnessed to subvert the flattening effect of globalization.

The concept of a non-place, which was introduced by Marc Augé, is a powerful anthropological and literary image, but, as Teti argues, it does not correspond to

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the life of the people who are everywhere engaged in the pursuit of a centre.15 The Calabrian marinas are emblematic of this urge. They also point to the need of newly constructed identities to accept and build on this intrinsic duality.

In the Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot says:

It is the other who exposes me to “unity”, causing me to believe in an irreplaceable singularity, for I feel I must not fail him; and at the same time he withdraws me from what would make me unique: I am not indispensable; in me anyone at all is called by the other - anyone at all as the one who owes him aid. The un-unique, always the substitute. The other is, for his part too, always other, lending himself, however, to unity; he is neither this one nor that one, and nonetheless it is to him alone that, each time, I owe everything, including the loss of myself. The responsibility with which I am charged is not mine, and because of it I am no longer myself.16

These words echo the two-fold effort of Calabrian people, to rescue abandoned towns from oblivion, and at the same time to perform refoundation rites in the marinas, that manifest their strong aspiration to become places and be recognized as such, regardless of their ‘other’.

Before the decline of the traditional societies of the inland, many people, known as ‘the walkers,’ used to move between villages, for work, to visit their place of origin, or to actively participate in the celebrations of the neighboring villages.

Once a year, it was customary to participate in the long Christian pilgrimage dedicated to Our Lady of the Mountain, a celebration that saw many walkers from other villages, often even from other provinces, coming together along the natural itineraries that stretch between different hamlets. Together, they would reach on foot the sanctuary located at the heart of the Aspromonte mountains.

Having a look at the trails of these pilgrims along the natural paths of rivers and mountains, it is easy to understand how fragmented the image of Calabria is, 15 Teti, Il Senso dei Luoghi, p. 19.

16 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015) p. 13.

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Figure 8: An old calendar hanging in the interior of an inland house depicts three hilltop towns founded by Albanians in Calabria.

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the one made of multiple separations, of non-communicating places, historically isolated. All the inland towns and villages used to behold each other, almost as a way of defeating their possible solitude; they would cross, meet and sustain one another. These long-established bonds and movements, however, were put at risk when the communities started to descend towards the coast. A new dimension, different landscapes, required the affirmation of new creeds, as an act of signification for the new settlements.

Water, for instance, has been a ritual element in many re-foundation events.

When the scarcity of drinking water made the inhabitants of Cerenzia decide to move away from their old town, the local administration hired a commission responsible of finding a site with abundant water, temperate weather and salubrious air to build the new town. Behind the culture of water, the abandonments and the fugue state, the pauses and the research, there exists a geography of thirsty villages. The natural element is constitutive of people’s identity, a distinctive trait of Calabrian people’s nostalgia and memory. As Teti deduced, a great deal of the sense of place in the region has been in fact the sense of water.17 Prayers to ward off the rain and chants to invoke it would be carried along to the new town, together with other myths, mourning traditions and the folklore of agropastoral towns. Thus, a dual communal identity began to emerge. The harsher the rupture, the more necessary the construction of continuity. This continuity is of course deceptive; it is not just the place that changes, but also the perception of it, the relationship with the past and that which has perished.

For the community this represents the beginning of a new history, yet there is no intention to erase or mislay the one that preceded it.

These efforts subtly speak of a yearning for unity, which is also manifest in the rituals created to embroil both halves, town one and town two, in the attempt to place back together – even if for an instant – all the scattered fragments that constitute the town, the peripheries left without a town center.

Often, a foundational myth is merely a myth of abandonment. Not only the founding, but also the destruction and abandonment of places tend to have a 17 Teti, Il Senso dei Luoghi, p. 500.

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Figure 9: An example of the idea of the third landscape by Gilles Clement, thriving in the narrow, deserted stairways of the medieval town.

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mythical explanation related to men’s flaws and mistakes.18 According to cultural and sacral modalities, the villages were founded following miraculous events, most of the time attributed to a saint or the Virgin, who would afterwards become the patron saint of the place.

The old town continues to be part of the imaginary of those who had to leave it, who were born in the marina or somewhere else. Meanwhile, its streets and houses become emptier and emptier; the saints have no inhabitants to protect or immigrants to welcome anymore.19 The intrinsic mobility in the region dates to as far back as the Ancient Greeks. This and other, more recent, precedents mean that abandonment ceases to be viewed as an ultimate event.

In fact, many places, despite living a progressive depopulation, experience the cyclic return of old inhabitants, who have now settled in the duplicate towns along the coast, in the flatlands, elsewhere in Italy or abroad. Some of the new coastal towns still have their cemeteries and places of worship in the inland. It is a remarkable paradox, for a region that clings on to faith, that large inhabited centers on both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts hardly have any sanctuary, and others, that are deserted during the year, teem with people on religious occasions.

In Nocera Terinese, Sant’Andrea, Badolato, Caulonia – to name a few – inhabitants organize their rituals and celebrations not where they factually reside, but “above”, as people refer to their respective inland towns. People from the unlinked surroundings, as well as migrants who annually travel back from their new countries, gather to set up some sort of operation aimed to reconstruct a social identity, and to avoid the absolute dissolution of the original town.

The occurrence of return is essential, for going back to celebrate a ritual means, in a way, to re-sanctify the place. Ceremonies are followed by banquets where people feast to honor the dead ones, a peculiar symbolic attempt — with somewhat pagan traits — to restore contact not only with those who passed away but also with those who no longer live there, because both are deceased in terms of their existence in the community. Processions are the expression of 18 Vito Teti, Terra Inquieta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2015) p. 53.

19 Teti, Il senso dei luoghi, pp. 385-89.

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a general wish for orientation; they alleviate the sense of distance and bewilderment of those who have remained and those who have left. Separate towns are linked by ancient traditions as well as postmodern initiatives, at different moments of the year.

A brief, but rampant example of town reunification is the procession of Madonna di Porto Salvo, which brings local people back to retrace their identity.

The painting of the Madonna dates back to the seventeenth century and its rediscovery is attributed to local sailors. Starting from the sanctuary in Melito di Porto Salvo, a town that was built on the site of the discovery, by the coast, the procession carries the canvas all the way up to the ruins of Pentedattilo. It will rest in the local church for about a month, becoming a popular destination for pilgrims from all over the region. Melito is another replica where the fleeing residents of the upper town had found shelter and established their community, after a series of destructive earthquakes. Nowadays, observing a centuries-old tradition, the inhabitants from Melito still entrust the effigy to the few remaining people of Pentedattilo, raising the ruins to places of recognition and attachment, and encouraging reflections about what is, to use Blanchot’s words, “the irreplaceable singularity” of the community and its possible future destiny.20 Beside describing Calabrian folklore and analyzing the importance of processions beyond the mere municipal borders, Corrado Alvaro glimpsed in the mountains an essential element in local people’s individual background. In such events, the sierra forms an amphitheater around the old town; it is no longer a watershed between fragments of an exploded universe, but instead a powerful call for reunification.21 Around it, the piazzas of the villages witness the processions ascending and evoke the impression of being inside a shell that resonates with the roar of the crowd, as if it were the sea.22 Such rejoicing of ‘return’ to the original upper towns, has obviously little to do with the traditional ancient rituals. The slow rhythms of the procession mark the interim between being deprived of the sacred effigy and reappropriating it.

20 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 13.

21 Corrado Alvaro, Polsi nell’arte, nella leggenda e nella storia, (Reggio Calabria: Iiriti Editore, 2005).

22 Alvaro, Polsi nell’arte, nella leggenda e nella storia.

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A common hesitation accompanies the delivery of the painting to the hilltop sanctuary, a gesture that can be read as a form of superstition. The reluctance to share the privilege of protection with the old town is, in fact, moved by the fear of suffering the same fate. Taking place far from the inhabited area, the square and the houses, this is an invented celebration, which intends to assert the presence of the new generation next to the memory of the elders. As a matter of fact, it would be wrong to impose a binary rhetoric of tradition and modernity on these places, because the two celebrations are inextricable, just like the two towns, the two stories, the two places. Both are dimensions where the past strives to pass, but at the same time they are new places in the process of self-articulation.

In this delicate interlude of reframing, the disaster would be related to forgetfulness.23 The youthful velleity of unity, though at times suffered, creates the indispensable shield for a still fragile, disharmonious identity that tiptoes to situate itself in the future. Without memory of values both tangible and intangible, that are linked to the spaces of the old town, without even these sporadic motions that bring people back to their roots, we would force a retreat of something that has not been treated, and in doing so allowing the new town’s collective identity to define itself would be severely compromised.24

23 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 3.

24 Ibid., p. 3.

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Figure 10: The coastal town of Crotone foregrounded by the fading skyline of Calabria’s mountains.

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