PZERØ PARALLELOZERO REPORTAGE MONTHLY
#04.2014
Editorial Israel
5
9Lives
Italy
7
Mare Nostrum
Mongolia
#04.2014
P
26
Transmongolian
Italy
40
Street artists
Nigeria
54
Thou shalt not have peace
Uganda
68
Future plans
Germany
77
The Wall's voices
South Korea
91
On the border
Multimedia
104
Campania d’Africa
Contacts
110
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EDITORIAL Every summer, they arrive in Lampedusa by boat, with calm or stormy seas, dressed in rags or so, and they would like to stay there forever: more or less like tourists, with the difference that tourists do not flee from war or famine, have not traveled weeks or months to reach the island, and theirs is not the journey which should start their new life. Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point. For the migrants or refugees who almost every day call on the island’s shores, or are recovered at sea while trying to reach them, Lampedusa is freedom, the door that opens on Europe, a new life: they often are unaware even of its name, nor do they know its precise location. The traffickers who organized the voyage from the African coast had them crammed aboard an old fishing boat, gave them just about enough water and gasoline, took the cash for the one-way ticket and pushed them into the sea. Many of those men, women and children are rescued at sea by the warships deployed by the Italian government to cope with the waves of migrants and prevent as many tragedies as possible. Alternatively, if the sea mounts or the boat suddenly gives way too early, death will find them first.
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On this issue of P’Zero we’ll also go to Israel, a country once again at war, where since the beginning of the Gaza crisis, the music played by a very peculiar (to say it with a euphemism) rock band has suddenly acquired a much deeper meaning. We’ll go to Berlin, where a wall fallen 25 years ago changed the landscape of the city - and the whole world - forever. We’ll go to Southern Italy, where we meet some of those unfortunate people who made it to Lampedusa only to find themselves in a hell not so different from the one they have been through to get to Europe. And we’ll go to Mongolia (you’ll have a hard time believing what we found), to Nigeria and Uganda, along the border between the two Koreas and inside the surprising microcosm of Italian female street artists. with the usual array of unexpected stories. Yet, for us the most significant summer story is the one that keeps repeating itself since so many years: through the Mediterranean, the Mare Nostrum which was once the center of the world, such a consistent part of the world, once again, is coming to us in desperation. And we can’t turn our face away.
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ISRAEL
9LIVES
P’Zero #warzones
ISRAEL
9LIVES By Bruno Zanzottera The members of the 9Lives band are nine young Israeli ex-soldiers victims of post-traumatic stress caused by war wounds. A few years ago they decided to form a rock band to try and heal through music therapy. Bassist Shlomi Gvili lost two fingers of his left hand and has developed a new playing technique, while guitarist Ofer Meyer lost an eye. Raz Hagag, a member and a former army doctor, argues that music is more effective than traditional therapy. The 9Lives, seven of whose members are self-taught musicians, have just released their first CD, which led them to perform with some of the stars of Israeli music in London and Los Angeles. And, perhaps not too surprisingly, what they most sing about is not the horrors of war, but the bliss of peace. watch on vimeo.com
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ITALY
MARE NOSTRUM
ITALY
MARE NOSTRUM By Sergio Ramazzotti Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point, is a dream. Every year, thousands of desperate migrants set sail from the Northern African shores on board overloaded and precarious boats, and attempt to cross over to this tiny island which, in their eyes, represents Europe and the chance for a new, better life. Many – exactly how many is unknown – never make it: the boat capsizes in a storm, or simply sinks under too much weight, and the passengers drown in the same waters which parted them from their dream. To prevent as many as possible of these casualties, Italy has deployed an imposing aero-naval operation called Mare Nostrum, whose main task is to save the migrants before it is too late. They are then taken to Italy, either Lampedusa or Sicily. But once they get there, their dream is still very far from coming true. 7
Channel of Sicily. Officers of the Italian warship San Marco on the bridge during navigation in a patrol sector some 100 miles south of Lampedusa 8
arrive in Lampedusa by boat, with calm or stormy seas, dressed in rags or so, and they would like to stay there forever: more or less like tourists, with the difference that tourists do not flee from war or famine, have not traveled weeks or months to reach the island, and theirs is not the journey which should start their new life.
THEY
Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point. An island slightly larger than its airport, lost in the middle of the Mediterranean 120 nautical miles north of the Libyan coast, a little more than six thousand inhabitants. For the migrants or refugees or illegal immigrants (human beings, however you classify them) who almost every day call on the island’s shores, or are recovered at sea while trying to reach them (over 15 thousand last year), Lampedusa is freedom, the end of a nightmare, the door that opens on Europe, a new life: they often are unaware even of its name, nor do they know its precise location. The traffickers who organized the voyage from the African coast had them crammed aboard an old fishing boat, gave them water and gasoline, took the cash for the one-way ticket (usually between 1000 and 2000 Euros) and pushed them into the sea with a single instruction: head north and sooner or later you’ll find a piece of Italy. Typically, before this happens it is a Navy ship which finds them: many of those men, women and children are rescued at sea by warships deployed by the Italian government to cope with the waves of migrants and avoid as many tragedies as possible. “In no other sea of the world so many people are rescued”, said Lampedusa’s harbor master. Alternatively, if the sea mounts or the boat suddenly gives way too early, death will find them first. Some episodes from last year, which holds one of the worst records for casualties among migrants. October 3, 2013: at night, a boat carrying nearly 500 migrants arrives in sight of Lampedusa. When the vessel is off the beach of Conigli, just before dawn, a passenger sets fire to a rag in a desperate attempt to be spotted from the ground. The fire gets out of control, spreads quickly on board, people throw themselves into the water. Most do not know 9
how to swim. When rescuers arrive, they find mostly dead bodies floating in the waters. The next day, the body count reaches 366. Eight days later, on October 11, another boat carrying 480 Syrian refugees is drifting one hundred kilometers south of Lampedusa. The hull embarks water: hours before, it was intercepted by a Libyan patrol boat, that in an attempt to turn it back fired machine gun shots against the keel, injuring some people. As the boat is slowly sinking, someone onboard makes a satellite phone call to the number for emergencies at sea. An Italian navy ship arrives too late: 268 dead bodies float in the water. Giusi Nicolini, the mayor of Lampedusa, said in tears to the cameras: “It is an infinite horror, corpses everywhere, it’s like hell”. Dante’s Inferno is the image that comes naturally to mind not only for the tragedies of last October, but for the whole phenomenon of immigration by sea. The crossing is actually just the last leg of a terrifying exodus that the majority of those who get to set foot on the Italian coasts have started long ago, hundreds, thousands of miles from Libya. They come from warravaged Syria, from Somalia or Eritrea via Egypt, from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Uganda through Agadez, Niger, crossing the Sahara clinging by the hundreds to the back of a truck, sometimes seeing their fellow travelers die of thirst, hiding in the undergrowth on the northern edge of the Libyan desert for weeks, and finally putting themselves in the clutches of a ruthless trafficker who, in exchange for an outrageous amount of money (for those who pay it, often the savings of a lifetime), warrants a place on board the floating shipwrecks with the bow pointed north. These, too, remind of a living Doré engraving of hell when you meet them on the high seas, with their cargo of still barely human beings pressed tight against each other and sunk below the threshold of dignity. Boats always one step away from sinking, the leaky keel transformed into a pool of sewage, the bows with the writings in Arabic that in vain glorify Allah and His mercy. And damned souls seem even the survivors, when rescued and taken on board one of the Navy ships, and finally landed on the pier of Lampedusa or in a port in Sicily: corroded by scabies, smelling like dead bodies, exhausted from hypothermia, from dehydration or the deep sores on the buttocks (caused by 10
sitting for days on the fuel tanks), their eyes bewildered and incredulous looking around to check the appearance of the heaven they have dreamed of for years, while the latex-gloved hands (not to contract scabies or not to get infected by despair?) of the men of the Navy, of the police, of doctors and nurses hold their feeble bodies. Men, women, children with a frightened gaze. Most of them do not even want to stay there, in Italy, they want to go to the north, to Sweden, to Norway, where they have heard that it is easier to get political asylum, and where migrants are ensured a lavish monthly subsidy. Seen from Lampedusa, a sliver of Italy surrounded by the blue Mediterranean Sea at a latitude 150 km further south than Tunis, inhabited by six thousand Italians who feel abandoned by Italy, the wave of migrants appears to be more disruptive than by reading statistical figures: an overwhelming tsunami that on the African coast has been managed as an industry for more than a decade, generating a turnover of tens of millions of Euros per year. In the Strait of Sicily south of Lampedusa, the Italian Navy has deployed an imposing apparatus, a war machine turned humanitarian cordon, consisting of the helicopter carrier San Marco (a ship of nearly eight thousand tons), two frigates, two patrol boats, two heavy helicopters, a patrol drone, two aircraft equipped with radar and cameras that allow you to see the faces of the occupants of a boat three miles away. Yet the Strait of Sicily is simply too large, and not even all of these ships and planes and helicopters can prevent the migrants, hobbling on their walnut shells, from completing the crossing with their own means and, despite the radars, ending up in Lampedusa, climbing the ridges until they find a road and here, drained of the last of their strength, collapsing on the ground and waiting for someone to find them. When a Navy ship finds them on the high seas instead, often there are paradoxical situations. It happened with the San Marco when, a hundred miles south of Lampedusa, the carrier intercepted a boat overloaded with two hundred people, all Eritreans. Captain Eugenio Zumpano stops the engines and sends to the vessel a fast boat carrying three Marines and an interpreter. 11
15 minutes later, on the bridge of the San Marco, the radio crackles. “They do not want to come”, says the interpreter. “They believe that we are Libyans, they do not trust us.” Zumpano is appalled: “I’ve never seen anything like that”. There is no choice: the barge continues sailing north, the San Marco – 135 meters of warship – trails behind at the same speed, five knots, and follows at a distance. We are in international waters, and as long as the occupants do not declare an emergency, there is nothing you can do. “Yet, given the conditions in which they’re sailing, we are obliged to follow them”, says the Captain. “There is a risk that they begin to take on water, and we can’t let them go alone.” To escort them all the way to Lampedusa would be absurd, but you can not force them to be taken on board the San Marco. Three hours go by, and finally the migrants seem to be convinced that we are not a Libyan warship willing to sink them. They turn off the engine, let us reach them, and are transferred to an amphibious landing craft and taken on board. The boat, as often happens, is set on fire: too dangerous for navigation to let it go adrift. Once the Eritreans have been refreshed with warm milk and cookies, the soldiers ask them: “Did you not see our Italian flag on the ship?”. A woman answers: “None of us has any idea what it looks like”. On June 28, 2008, at six o’clock in the evening, Bernardino De Rubeis, thenmayor of Lampedusa, walked along Via Roma, the town’s main street, at the head of a hundred people who were holding lighted torches. Tourists sitting at the cafés asked in surprise: “What’s the procession about?”. It was to commemorate the migrants killed at sea, to whom sculptor Mimmo Paladino had dedicated a monument overlooking the coast, a tragic arc of refractory porcelain and iron stitches. While the mayor inaugurated the artwork and paid tribute to the nameless dead, someone among those present complained that Italy had lavished more resources in the construction of the new reception center for migrants than for the welfare of the people of Lampedusa: “We don’t even have a hospital”, said a voice in the crowd. Six years later, the complaints on Lampedusa are the same. The island still does not have a real hospital. Nothing, or almost, has been done to stem the 12
flow of migration. And probably it won’t be possible to do anything until Libya has a government capable of controlling the coasts, and the civil wars in Somalia and Syria come to an end. A fisherman, gaze fixed on the horizon to the south, extends his arms to express helplessness or despair and tells me: “What can we do, this sea is like a highway now�. And like any highway, it claims its victims. But no matter how dangerous the crossing: the risk is not enough to discourage the boat people who, fascinated by the legends of the North (we call it the West), evacuated from a South increasingly resembling a rotten intestine, continue to face hunger and thirst and death with the callous tenacity of those who have nothing more to lose than life, aiming toward the sacred shores of the Mediterranean and the fleeting thrill and the long purgatory of clandestinity or, in the worst cases, ending up on the bottom of the sea, their lungs full of that same salt water which divides them from hope. Sergio Ramazzotti
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Channel of Sicily. Syrian and Eritrean migrants are transferred by the soldiers of the San Marco brigade on board a vessel of Italian warship San Marco (right, in the background) from their boat going adrift, after this has been spotted at dawn some 100 miles south of Lampedusa 14
Channel of Sicily. Syrian and Eritrean migrants are transferred by the soldiers of the San Marco brigade on board a vessel of Italian warship San Marco from their boat going adrift, after this has been spotted at dawn some 100 miles south of Lampedusa
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Channel of Sicily. Eritrean migrants on board a vessel of the Italian warship San Marco, used to rescue their boat which was going adrift 16
Channel of Sicily. An EH 101 helicopter on the flight bridge of Italian warship San Marco in navigation south of Lampedusa during operation Mare Nostrum. The chopper is used for patrolling the Channel of Sicily, as well as for SAR operations
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Channel of Sicily. A sailor of the Italian warship San Marco on watch on the bridge checks the course during navigation in a patrol sector some 100 miles south of Lampedusa 18
Channel of Sicily. Soldiers of the San Marco brigade approach a fishing boat loaded with migrants and going adrift, after it was spotted at dawn by the Italian warship San Marco (right, in the background)
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Channel of Sicily. Syrian and Eritrean migrants have been transferred by the soldiers of the San Marco brigade on board a vessel of Italian warship San Marco from their boat going adrift, after this has been spotted at dawn some 100 miles south of Lampedusa
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Channel of Sicily. Syrian and Eritrean migrants are transferred by the soldiers of the San Marco brigade on board a vessel of Italian warship San Marco from their boat going adrift, after this has been spotted at dawn some 100 miles south of Lampedusa
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Channel of Sicily. Syrian and Eritrean migrants are transferred on board Italian warship San Marco after being rescued from their boat going adrift some 100 miles south of Lampedusa 22
Channel of Sicily. Migrants in the cargo bridge of Italian warship San Marco, which rescued them some 100 miles south of Lampedusa and is taking them to Sicily
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Channel of Sicily. Officers of the Italian warship San Marco watch from the bridge a boat loaded with migrants and adrift, spotted in the middle of the night some 100 miles south of Lampedusa
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TRANSMONGOLIAN
MONGOLIA
TRANSMONGOLIAN
WOMEN OF THE By Paulo Siqueira
Prostitution is a big word, to describe what goes on on the straights of the great Amazon River of Brazil in a region privy to years of conquest and exploitation. The life of the river people or “Ribeirinhas”as they are
MONGOLIA
TRANSMONGOLIAN By Ă lvaro Laiz The Secret History of the Mongols, the oldest literary work written in the Mongolian language, tells how Gengiz Khan was able to put under his control more than 30 fighting tribes, and how, once in power, he declared homosexuality illegal in order to increase the population of his new empire. Today, more than 800 years later, Mongolia is an independent country with the lowest population density in the world: less than two inhabitants per square km. And homosexuality is still the strongest taboo. It is curious, though, how transsexualism has solid roots inside the shamanic traditional culture. Shamans had a special status inside the Mongolian nomadic community: they would connect the spiritual world with humans. And transgender shamans, blessed with the power of two spirits, were considered even more special. In the years of the Soviet Union, Mongolian homosexuals were sent to gulags: nowadays, some of them do not want to hide anymore and prefer to take their risk, betting on the freedom which modernization is bringing to their country.
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Nurbul, a professional dancer, prepares himself for a private show at a gay party in Ulaanbataar 27
Detail of Gambush´s bedside table. He is the keeper of a brothel in Ulaanbataar 28
"Since I was very young I knew I wanted to dress like a girl. I felt I was a girl, but I was told I had to behave like a boy and I couldn´t understand why" says Nyamka. He is now 20 and lives in Ulaanbataar in a rented single room 29
The cultural heritage left by the years under Soviet control, a time in which homosexuals were sent to gulags, still weighs on gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, who continue to be victimized 30
Naaram, dressed in a traditional Mongolian queen outfit
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Most of Mongolia is uninhabited. Extreme conditions and nomadic tradition contribute to its unique landscape
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Baara, 55, lives in one of the poorest districts in Ulaanbataar. "The city is very small. It's difficult for me to get a good job because everyone knows me" he says. Baara works for an Ngo that pays him a salary barely enough to get along 33
Naaram with his adoptive son. "I took care of him since he was a baby, but, since gays are not allowed to adopt, his legal parents are my sister and her husband", he says
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Ny removes his make up and changes his female clothes on a taxi after his show at an underground party, where he performed as his alter ego "Vanity". Men who dress like girls in public may suffer harrassment or physical violence
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Margaash dressed in a traditional Mongolian queen outfit
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Gambush (right) watches carefully his pupil’s dance moves at a brothel in Ulaanbataar 38
ITALY
STREET ARTISTS
ITALY
STREET ARTISTS By Marika Puicher They come from different artistic and professional backgrounds, but what all these women have in common is a passion for deserted places and empty surfaces which they use as canvases for their works. They have chosen an artistic path which, until recently, when street art and graffiti were still seen as mere vandalism, was an exclusively male dominion. Recognized as a contemporary form of art long ago outside Italy, lately street art has been acquiring a unique role in the Italian art scene as well. As a consequence, many artists who used to work illegally in urban spaces or were forced to migrate to make a living out of their passion, are now more and more sought-after by public and private companies, as well as prominent art galleries. The number of Italian female street artists, however, is still relatively low compared to their male colleagues. 40
Alice Pasquini, 33, next to one of her murals in the Pigneto neighbourhood in Rome. Alice, known as AliCè, is an internationally renowned illustrator, set designer and street artist. She has lived and worked in the UK, France and Spain 41
Signora K, 28,in front of one of the murals that she painted in a deserted space in Parma. She started painting illegally when she was a teenager, following the crew of graffiti writers in her hometown Reggio Emilia 42
Microbo, 43, in her studio in Milan. She is one of the few first-generation female street artists in Italy. Born in Sicily, she moved to London in the 1990s and to Milan in 2000: here she organized the first international street art events 43
Marzia Formoso, 32, with one of her works. Known as Nais, she started her career as a member of Milan’s graffiti writers movement, painting mainly illegally
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A mural by writer Nemo along the railway in Bologna. Nemo is one of very few Italian women graffiti writers. She started painting illegal graffiti in Bologna, where some of her works on walls downtown caused a sort of witch-hunt in 2009
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Pax Paloscia, 38, in her house in Rome. She is a versatile artist who lives between Rome and New York. Although she does not define herself as a street artist, she is known as one of the first women to bring street art to Rome through posters and stickers mainly posted illegally
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Martina Merlini, 27, during the preparation of WAX, her personal exhibition held in Bologna in 2013. In 2012 she took part in “Living Walls�, the first women's street art festival in Atlanta, U.S.A.
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A mural by artist Gio Pistone in the Quadraro neighbourhood in Rome. Pistone, who started painting graffiti when she was a teenager, was also a stage designer for cinema and theatre, before going back to street art at the age of 30
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Gio Pistone at the Casa dell'Architettura in Rome, where she has created murals together with artist Nicola Alessandrini
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Eugenia Garavaglia, 32, started painting illegally in urban spaces while she was attending the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Milan. More recently, besides creating murals, she has been mainly working on illustrations while running art labs for children 50
Laszlo Biro is a small art gallery which opened in Rome in 2010 with the aim to promote street and urban art. It mainly hosts temporary street art installations and graffiti, offering an opportunity to young national and international underground artists 51
Writer Nemo next to one of her graffiti along the tracks of Milan’s Porta Garibaldi railway station
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THOU SHALT NOT HAVE PEACE
GOD
NIGERIA
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE PEACE
by Francesco Alesi
When St. Patrick set his feet on Irish land to preach Christianity, it is unlikely there were any Irish Travellers in sight. Almost sixteen Centuries later, the Irish Travellers is one of the strongest Catholic communities in the world.
NIGERIA
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE PEACE By Marco Gualazzini An explosion. Columns of smoke rising up from the bus station in Kano. People killed and injured. The latest in a series of attacks that are wreaking havoc in Northern Nigeria, the country that, after Somalia and Mali, has become the scenario of the most recent attempts to export the jihad to Africa. On one side, Boko Haram, the fundamentalist group whose armed factions are trying to create an Islamic state in the North of the country. On the other, an entire population, made up of Christians and Muslims alike, helplessly facing the horror of ambush attacks and car bombs. The battle of the Islamic militia has wormed its way into an existing ethnic and religious conflict driven by social disparity. Nigeria is sinking deep into a fratricidal conflict in which, once again, the Kalashnikovs sing in the name of God. 54
Madarasatu Kafaliatu Ibrahim School in Kano is one of the oldest madrasas, or Islamic schools, in the city, where hundreds of children are taught the Koran
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Friday prayer in the main mosque in Jos
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Jos, capital of the Plateau state, is a city in which the conflict is rapidly setting the Muslim and Christian communities (like the one living in these huts in the Christian quarter) against each other 57
Friday prayer in the main mosque in Jos
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After the increase in Boko Haram’s terrorist attacks, the number of checkpoints in Kano has risen dramatically 59
Pupils study the Koran in Madarasatu Kafaliatu Ibrahim School, one of the oldest madrasas in Kano
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Kuru Jentar, a Muslim village in the province of Jos, was set on fire in 2010 and never rebuilt. This is what remains of the mosque
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From left, Ann, Scholastica, Emmanuel, Emmanuella, Regina, Faith Emmanuel: they are the family of Ndat Emmanuel Kanke, Regina’s husband, killed in the attack carried out by Boko Haram in March, 2012 in the Church of Saint Finbar in Jos 62
There are some 250 army and police checkpoints in the city of Jos only, with 80 more put in place on Fridays and Sundays, service days for Muslims (here entering Jos’s main mosque for the Friday prayer) and Christians 63
In Jos, the army took control of most streets, which were closed to traffic and subjected to numerous checks
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Sunday service in Saint Joseph Catholic church in Kano. The largest urban settlement in Northern Nigeria, Kano has a 95 per cent Muslim population and is one of the cities hit hardest by Boko Haram 65
The Via Crucis procession in the catholic church of St. Peter and Paul in Jos 66
UGANDA
FUTURE PLANS
UGANDA
FUTURE PLANS By à lvaro Laiz The war in Northern Uganda began in 1986 and has been marked by the LRA's (Lord's Resistance Army) brutality against civilians, including the exploitation of children as fighters and sex slaves, and the widespread use of mutilation. The violence has led to nearly two million people being displaced from their homes and forced to live in refugee camps. Human rights groups have also reported war crimes by the government army. Future Plans is an up-close testimony from LRA survivors, but also from Ugandan Army victims in one of the longest conflicts in African history. Today the horror has gone from Uganda, but it hasn’t vanished: the abductions, killings and slaughtering committed by the LRA have a new scenario in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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GERMANY
THE WALL'S VOICES
GERMANY
THE WALL'S VOICES By Bruno Zanzottera For many years, Berlin was the focal point of the Cold War between the West and the Communist world. The Wall, which divided the city from 1961 to 1989, became the symbol of the drama suffered by the German population after Nazism and the tragedy of the Second World War. The year 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the destruction of the Wall. We met those who lived the history of the Wall firsthand: from the artists who painted kilometres of it, creating one of the world’s largest collective works of arts, to the 'mauerspechte' (wall woodpeckers) who rushed to knock down parts of it after the fall, the radio presenters who commented the day of the reunification, and East Berliners victims of political persecution.
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A painting depicts the kiss between Honecker and Brezhnev on a Trabant smashing through the wall, in the East Side Gallery
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A surviving stretch of wall in Bernauer Strasse
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Kiddy Citny, one of the most prolific wall artists, poses in his studio
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Gabriele Hartmann, one of the many people from West Berlin who took part in the demolition of the wall using hammer and chisel, in front of a painting on the wall in the East Side Gallery
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Klaus Brenneisen, who was a radio presenter at the time of the fall, near the bridge which before 1989 was the main thoroughfare between East and West Berlin
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Paintings in the East Side Gallery
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Kiddy Citny, one of the most prolific wall artists, in his Berlin studio
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A postcard on sale in a Berlin souvenir shop contains a fake chip of the wall 85
A large mural in front of the River Spree marks the former boundary between East and West Berlin 86
An artist at work in the Tacheles, a historical location in Berlin that houses a collective of artists from all over the world 87
Crosses remember the people who lost their lives in an attempt to cross the Wall. In the background, the new German Chancellery building
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SOUTH KOREA
ON THE BORDER
SOUTH KOREA
ON THE BORDER By Alessandro Gandolfi The last wall of the Cold War is a funfair closely watched by soldiers. Its name is Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and it is the buffer zone created at the end of the war in 1953. Five hundred kilometres along the 38th parallel, open to tourists after half a century of isolation, which become a coast-to-coast trip through pristine nature reserves, underground tunnels and observation towers. Here, binoculars pointed at North Korea are the metaphor of a sixty-year-old obsession: the enemy must be studied, spied upon, photographed. Also by kids on a school trip. Even though nothing ever happens in the end. Yet, following the DMZ is not just a patriotic pilgrimage: the trip offers the portrait of a country where living in the shadow of a barbed wire fence has become the normality.
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Ganghwa-eup, Ganghwado Island (South Korea). Farmers at work in the fields near the fence that marks the border between North and South Korea
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Gwangsam-ri (South Korea). Tourists visit the so called “2nd Infiltration Tunnel�. Between 1974 and 1990 South Korea discovered four tunnels dug by North Korea for an invasion. Tourists can now visit all four of them
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Cheorwon Peace Observatory (South Korea). Tourists watch nearby North Korea with binoculars
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Ganghwa-eup, Ganghwado Island (South Korea). A soldier on an observation tower along the border
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Hwajinpo Beach (South Korea). Tourists collect mussels near the fence of the Hwajinpo History and National Security Museum. The border is 16 kilometres away
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Yeoncheon (South Korea). Women exercise at the rhythm of music. The border with North Korea is a few kilometres away 97
Aegibong Peak Observatory, Gageumri (South Korea). A typical North Korean house has been reproduced in the observatory museum
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Hyeonnae-myeon (South Korea). A tourist takes a self-portrait at the Unification Observatory with North Korea behind his back
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Jangheung-ri (South Korea). Tourists get ready for a rafting trip along the Hantangang river, a few kilometres from the border with North Korea
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Sambuyeon Waterfalls (South Korea), Korean boys watch the waterfalls, a few kilometres away from the border with North Korea
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Paju (South Korea), Imjingak Park. A scale model of a North Korean soldier for sale in the park’s souvenir shop
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ITALY
CAMPANIA D’AFRICA
Parallelozero Multimedia
ITALY
CAMPANIA D’AFRICA By Francesco Alesi Castel Volturno, a city of 25,000 40 kilometres north of Naples, has the highest density of Africans in Europe: ten percent of the population. Yet, according to the Caritas Centre, Africans living in the city could well be over 10-15,000, more than half the population. Most of them are young, male, poor and paperless sub-Saharians who live in the town’s dilapidated suburbs. They wake up at 4.30 am to be on the first bus to Naples, where they might get a job for 25 euros a day. For the Italian Government they are illegal aliens, while best-selling Italian writer Roberto Saviano defines them as an asset for Italy. In 2008, South African singer Miriam Makeba died in Castel Volturno after giving her last concert here. ”After all, she died in Africa”, said her relatives. watch on vimeo.com
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