Isola Zavorra
Zavorra Island (in Italian the word Zavorra means both ballast in nautical terms and aeronautics, and dead weight when used figuratively)
Preamble. Visit to the hospice. It's a hot day of July. Bicycle races on TV; motionless wheelchairs and walking frames pulled with difficulty. A couple of
ninety-year-old guests are arguing. The wife insults her husband. Mr Bertolino - another guest -intervenes on behalf of the husband saying: “You must treat your husband well, because he was a sensible and good worker! I knew him well…” The husband nods pleased.
Zavorra Island is a project on loss of identity suffered by people who were and who now are not anymore what they remember they were and what they confused tell they were. They are the old guests of the hospice Marino in Trapani, a non-place consigned on the outskirts of the city on the Zavorra Island, a lump of soil emerged between the port and the salt-works. In ancient time, that space was meant for the unloading of ballast from the hold of the boats that stopped over in the island, and for the loading of the purchased salt. Today that dismissed area is a dead weight for the remodelled port of Trapani, city of the salt and the sail, as we may read on tourist brochures, and its guests have become dead weight for a tourist industry that contemplates old age as noxious for its economy.
The old people in the hospice talk about themselves as in the past, they remember they homes and their jobs not with homesickness, but to recall who they were and where they lived, in order to hold tight to something in the limbo they now live into, annihilated by the double stranglehold of their existential and environmental loss of identity.
The sound recording is an excerpt from the live television report of the climbing of Etna in the Tour of Italy 2011.
Preamble. Visit to the hospice. It's a hot day of July. Bicycle races on TV; motionless wheelchairs and walking frames pulled with difficulty. A couple of
ninety-year-old guests are arguing. The wife insults her husband. Mr Bertolino - another guest -intervenes on behalf of the husband saying: “You must treat your husband well, because he was a sensible and good worker! I knew him well…” The husband nods pleased.
Zavorra Island is a project on loss of identity suffered by people who were and who now are not anymore what they remember they were and what they confused tell they were. They are the old guests of the hospice Marino in Trapani, a non-place consigned on the outskirts of the city on the Zavorra Island, a lump of soil emerged between the port and the salt-works. In ancient time, that space was meant for the unloading of ballast from the hold of the boats that stopped over in the island, and for the loading of the purchased salt. Today that dismissed area is a dead weight for the remodelled port of Trapani, city of the salt and the sail, as we may read on tourist brochures, and its guests have become dead weight for a tourist industry that contemplates old age as noxious for its economy.
The old people in the hospice talk about themselves as in the past, they remember they homes and their jobs not with homesickness, but to recall who they were and where they lived, in order to hold tight to something in the limbo they now live into, annihilated by the double stranglehold of their existential and environmental loss of identity.
The sound recording is an excerpt from the live television report of the climbing of Etna in the Tour of Italy 2011.
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