Documenting Genoa's Unseen: Bertora and Grippa's Per vie traverse–racconti dal Ghetto di Croce Bianca (2011) and Nessun fuoco nessun luogo (2015)

L'intolleranza nega la prossimità, separae mette a distanza attività, edifici, spazipubblici, loro abitanti e frequentatori. […]L'intera storia della città occidentale, forsedi ogni città, potrebbe essere scritta avendoriferimento ai sistemi di compatibilità trapersone, gruppi sociali e attività che, neidiversi periodi e nelle diverse parti delpianeta, l'hanno marcata

—Bernardo Secchi.¹

The dossier on poverty in Genoa compiled in 2018 by the Centro Studi Genova Che Osa highlighted the indices of economic hardship in Liguria and Genoa, territories that over several decades have experienced increases in poverty and social exclusion, low quality housing and unemployment.² More broadly, Italians who are skating the poverty level now comprise 30% of the population. In the region [End Page S-345] of Liguria alone, the rate of below-poverty inhabitants has quadrupled since 2008. Faced with this alarming situation, the city council in Genoa recently approved hardline measures concerning the use of downtown space that are aimed at punishing those who rummage in trash bins as well as the homeless people who dwell in the city center.³ This restricting of access to heretofore public space has not gone unnoticed by urbanists or residents, for it raises broader issues about urban space, conceived as both physically constructed environment and inhabited and lived space. The present essay is a meditation on film and space in Genoa, in which my guiding interests are: one, how the built environment frames the lives of two different populations in Genoa-the inhabitants of the ghetto and the homeless in the city center; and, two, how documentary directors Marco Bertora and Carla Grippa represent both populations inhabiting and living space.

Since 2008, Bertora and Grippa have collaborated on documentaries that express their passion for cinematographic narration and embody what Edward Soja has defined spatial justice.⁴ Soja recognizes that the built environment mediates, creates and reproduces power relationships. In this sense, contemporary urban places are primarily designed and programmed to respond to precise interests; namely, "the pursuit of amenity, profit, status and political power."⁵ According to the architect and urban planner Bernardo Secchi,

in tutte le grandi città sta emergendo una topografia sociale sempre più contrastata. Essa ha una lunga storia dietro di sé, e nel tempo da topografia si è trasformata in una altrettanto chiara topologia riconoscibile nelle pratiche dello spazio urbano quanto negli immaginari collettivi e individuali, un modo di dare un senso irreversibile ai luoghi e alle parti di città che diviene sempre più nitido, come in una progressiva messa a fuoco della sua immagine.⁶

Along the same lines, urban social geographers have reflected on negative place reputation and the production and contestation of territorial stigma, explaining how everyday conversation, political rhetoric and various conventional and social media forge a stigmatizing imaginary around certain spaces and neighborhoods. Specific places consequently become no-go zones, which in turn restricts [End Page S-346] the interactions between residents and non-residents.⁷ As has been observed, "[t]erritorial stigmatization is not a static condition or a neutral process, but a consequential and injurious form of action through collective representation fastened on place."⁸ As cinematic interventions in the struggle for spatial justice in Genoa, the two documentaries resist the individual and collective stigmatization of space and place—and the social inequality and marginalization embedded within them.

Spatial justice is thwarted, in Genoa and elsewhere, by government measures that generate interdictory space—spacial devices to intercept or filter out would-be users, accompanied often by the rhetoric of local and national security, "even at the cost of restricting the spaces of democracy, an indirect principle of cooptation and selective exclusion."⁹ The installation of gates and other barriers, together with other design measures that cut off access to public space, embed power relations within the built environment. Such government measures call into question the very existence of public space, as has been noted by urbanists: "[p]ublic space is the tool, object, and place of negotiation. When it becomes not negotiable, its publicness...