Naples, Italy
Mission Title: Scampia - Life Under Camorra
Mission By: Tina Willim, Andreas Unteidig
Mission Finished on Date: 10-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Meet up with photographer Mario Spada, whose work has reported some of the difficult living situations in the Quartieri Spagnoli.
- Ask Mario about the reasons that led him to choose that kind of subjects, and how was he able to get close enough to them.
- Take a walk around the Quartieri with him, having him show you both the beautiful side and the less pleasant corners.
- Report the atmosphere and the absence of institutions. Interview Mario about the human potential going astray and ask him about possible solutions.
- Get a good shot of Spaccanapoli from a good vantage point.
TRAVEL BAG
Can the soul of a neighborhood survive the mafia?
Despite the name “Vele” (Italian for “sails”), the seven huge triangular blocks in the Neapolitan Scampia quarter are anything but light. And the desperate situation in which their thousands and thousands of legal and illegal tenants live – or survive – are anything but moving on. The Vele in Scampia not only rank as some of the ugliest buildings ever built on Italian ground, but they're also yet another failed attempt to resolve social issues with mass housing structures, in pure 70s fashion. There's plenty of these monuments to misery in the northern suburbs of Napoli, fertile grounds for big and small criminal businesses and especially for the local mafia, the Camorra.
By far the most trigger-happy of the mafias, the Camorra lacks a pyramidal structure and is instead split into many families and clans, often at war. Nevertheless, it was born as an order enforcing organization and, after all, it still is. In the dark streets of Scampia and in the Vele halls, between those whitish, massive walls, law and order split and the former gives way to the latter. “The system”, as the people from Naples call it, is an alternative government: it provides a better wage and health care than the state and creates is own laws. Unemployment, prostitution, family wars break the neighborhood's life apart, making it hard to live and easy to die. Photographer Mario Spada has been documenting it for years with his camera, and little has changed in Naples since he started.
