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- What is going on here?
Due to heavy rains, a devastating storm hit Giampillieri In the autumn of 2009.
The storm caused the overflow of waterways and numerous landslides, which in turn caused the very harmful slide downstream of mudflows and debris. The most affected municipalities are located in an area south of Messina, along the Ionian coast. These are places with a high hydrogeological risk and already victims, in the past, of similar events: Scaletta Marina, Giampilieri Superiore, Giampilieri Marina, Altolia, Molino, Santo Stefano di Briga, Briga Superiore and Pezzolo.
On 7 October there were 25 official deaths and the then head of the Civil Protection, Guido Bertolaso, declared that in all probability even 10 of the people still missing could be considered dead. There were 29 injured inpatients and 564 persons that lost their houses who where displaced in hotels in the area.
Later the number of victims rose to 38.
Within a few days the Council of Ministers declared a state of emergency in the affected areas.
According to data provided by Bertolaso himself, more than 2,386 men, including army soldiers and law enforcement officers, brought help, and 567 Civil Protection vehicles were used.
- Which are the agents implied (alive or not, human or not, powerful or powerless)?
It all began with the intensification of a disturbance from the Balearic Islands, which arrived in Sicily caused the storm. In less than three hours the connections were already blocked: roads and railways were damaged and during the night began to collapse buildings of Scaletta Zanclea and Giampilieri Superiore. When, the next day, the light illuminated Giampilieri and other places, the scenes were of the apocalyptic ones. Many people had been buried under the mud, others had taken refuge above the roofs of the houses. Dozens of villages and hamlets had remained completely isolated and communications were impossible. The aid immediately activated by the Civil Protection arrived, for several days, only by sea, and this made the rescue operations even more difficult. Water and mud had covered everything. In some areas, 230 millimetres of rain had fallen in less than 4 hours.
- Wheres (spatiality / situatedness / displacements / distribution)?
The storm hit north-eastern Sicily. The most affected municipalities are located in an area south of Messina, along the Ionian coast. These are places with a high hydrogeological risk and already victims, in the past, of similar events: Scaletta Marina, Giampilieri Superiore, Giampilieri Marina, Altolia, Molino, Santo Stefano di Briga, Briga Superiore and Pezzolo.
- Whens (temporality / durability / existing / extinct / repeated)?
The storm began on the evening of October the 1st and lasted all night until the morning of the next day. The rescuing helps brought by the gouvernement lasted until the 7th of October. The trial to find the human responibles as well the reconstruction and put into safety of the village lasted until 2017.
- Semiotic-materialities: what signs and matters are at work in this ensemble?
The flood had been devastating, but the institutions could certainly have done more, at least to avoid the damage. Guido Bertolaso himself cited illegal building as one of the causes of the destruction of entire structures. The prosecutor's office of Messina opened an investigation for culpable disaster. The causes that have contributed to make catastrophic the flood of Giampilieri and the surrounding areas would also be other and not all due to nature, including the abandonment of the territory without any control, especially at the forest level, the increase in torrential rains, the bureaucratic slowness in securing the territory, the underestimation of the risk in those areas.
On July 2017, the Court of Appeal of Messina Wednesday evening acquitted all who had so far been identified as possible responsible for the flood of Giampilieri , "because the fact does not exist", even the only two defendants who had been convicted in the first degree, six years for multiple manslaughter: the former mayor of Messina Giuseppe Buzzanca and the former mayor of Scalettta Zanclea Mario Briguglio. And all the other defendants were acquitted, as happened the previous year in the first degree, too.
- Your entanglement with the scene
In the framework of the european project 'Iterations', our partner organisation Dyne organised a 10-days residency in the small village of Giampilieri superiore close to the Ionic cost of Sicily, in Italy. I was there with my colleagues to attend the final presentations of the residency and I was impressed but the 'damage' history of this village as were the artists who participated to the residency and got in touch with the local people.
- Can a pattern be identified here? To what extent is this damage structural, or singular?
Giampilieri has made safe and sheltered from new possible floods by a huge concrete construction. If they were to occur, in fact, the water would end up in the gutter channel upstream of the country, which is connected with the channel fugitive, and then end in the stream Giampilieri, which has an enlarged flow to collect everything. The gutter channel is imposing, 11 metres wide and 9 metres high, to prevent mudflows down into the valley. Any residual debris can still run its course without creating damage because, on the way to the sea, now there are no more homes. Some of them have been knocked down by the flood, others by the hand of man to make room for the canal and those who have lost their homes have been compensated.
The channel is a concrete wound that cuts through a village that is already small in itself; it remains empty and unused for most of the time and the inhabitants do not know how to relate to this 'forced' presence and how to live with it. Structural damage becomes shared collective memories damage?