The Silence of Genoa

     When I conceived of my Moscow-Petushki (elektrichka-based) Project, the centre of Moscow would have been absent. It was very much a peripheries project. And yet here Genoa can not be absent. It is central because the story I went to tell would be impossible without it. Genoa's role in the forging of utopian practices and projects, its centrality to revolt and insurrection along this 'Red Riviera', is, well, fundamental. Genoa has often been a site of rebellion and insurrection and any story about Liguria makes little sense without the city. A city that in any case is a collection of distinct localities that only last century were amalgamted into a greater Genoa under the fascist regime. I'll try to make clearer my lines of thought about this in future posts. But another reason for Genoa being at the very heart of the project is that another fundamental idea/plan of these 'notebooks' was based around the city. If the 'red tour guide' popped into my head in the city of Carrara (part of Lunigiana and which finds itself outside the perimeters of the Ligurian Riviera but is, nonetheless, inextricably linked with parts of Liguria), another fundamental idea is at the core of this project. Lately, I have come to think that there is a certain silence in all 'Genoa discourse'. There is generally a silence at the core of images of Genoa linked to the fact that there has never been a real reckoning regarding the Genoa of 2001. Its G8 trauma. Soon it will be the 25th anniversary of these events (in just over 19 months time). Maybe it's time to think about how the 25th anniversary will be 'celebrated' or remembered. There is little hope that a rightist administration will put on a large exhibition regarding these events, and even if the Centre Left were to win the municipal elections next Spring, it is also doubtful whether they will be willing to create any big events dedicated to this moment in Genoa's history (which they, too, are unlikely to be willing to highlight for reasons 'pragmatic' or 'craven'). 

    Yet there is to me an example of what could be done to commemorate it, an exhibition that marked another traumatic event that could act as a kind of prototype. It was an event that I regularly think back to, an example of marking something that the authorities want hidden. A small scale exhibition in 2013 in a peripheral museum in Moscow was set up to mark the events in Moscow in October 1993 when tanks crushed anti-Yeltsin demonstrations and fired on Russia's Parliament. This hidden trauma was a subject that neither the Putinist authorities nor much of the liberal intellighentsia wanted unearthed, dissected, remembered. The curator of the exhibition and of the small museum in Krasnya Presnenskaya (a small district of Moscow where momentous revolutionary/insurrectional events had taken place at both the beginning and the end of the 20th Century), Ilya Budraitskis, managed to go against the grain and set up a small but (in hindsight) an extremely momentous event in a smallish, underfunded local Moscow Museum. (It is a curious fact to note that I subsequently learnt that Budraitskis had actually travelled to Genoa in July 2001 and witnessed the events of those days). An excellent article by Sophie Pinkham on the museum and the exhibition was published in The Nation in 2013. 

    Genoa, too, for the 25th anniversary of the G8 surely requires an activist exhibition somewhere in the city to mark these events. They can also surely be contextualised within a reading of Genoa's earlier history, especially in the context of the many revolts and liberations that marked the 19th Century. The early port workers struggles, the biennio rosso, anti-fascist traditions during the fascist ventennio, resistance and liberation in 1944 and 1945, the reaction of the city to the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948, the occupation of factories and trade union struggles in the 1950s and beyond, the events of June 1960 when the city halted a fascist congress and eventually brought down the government which had external support from the fascist (or post-fascist) MSI party, Genoa's 1968, Genoa in the 1970s and so on. 

    In following posts I'll try to imagine some ideas in which this event or exhibition could be curated. Suffice it to say that there is a considerable amount of work that has been written on Genoa 2001 but much of it is unconnected to Genoa's previous history. Looking back, it has been very much a forgotten moment of global history but there was always a doubt in me as to whether the 21st Century really began on September 11th, 2001 in New York or rather instead maybe we need to think of Genoa in mid July 2001 as being another moment. Counterintuively, maybe the contrast between the

chumminess of Blair, Putin, Bono and Bob Geldof and the inert body of Carlo Giuliani leads to another narration of events that may, in time, prove more prescient than the burning twin towers. 

    The silence of Genoa in the title is, of course, a citation of a poem by a now almost forgotten French poet André Frénaud who, however, was one of the great post war French poets who was translated into Italian by such major literary figures as Giorgio Caproni and Franco Fortini (indeed there is one volume available of his poetry translated by 15 Italian poets including Pasolini, Luzi, Sereni, Ungaretti, Vittorini and others). One of the fundamental texts on Genoa by 20th Century poets (others are by Dino Campana and Giorgio Caproni among others). Frénaud, a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121 supporting the right to insubordination in the Algerian War, starts his Genoa poem with an inscription:

Sauras-tu pressentir encore le reve inscrit
ressassé dans ces pierres?