#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #SICILIA #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy #Sicilia Libertaria November 22: gela - The six-legged intellectual (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Only Jacopo Fo was missing. One who has done something good in his life too - he

is one of the founders of the satirical magazine Il Male, has been dealing with
energy since the 70s, is still the son of Dario Fo and Franca Rame - but who in
recent years it has taken a petty and dangerous drift, were it not even
ridiculous before. One day this cultural animator, as he defines himself, shows
up in Gela, it was the first months of 2019 if I remember correctly. The city was
still in a dramatic phase, politics and institutions and trade unions kept saying
that the conversion of Eni's refinery was underway and instead, in addition to
the well-known environmental havoc, it was also necessary to address the lack of
work. In such a delicate moment Jacopo Fo arrives, on behalf of one of his
thousand companies (the Atlantide group), and says: I will raise this city as I
did in Mozambique. There are those who smile, say "shit accussì bad semu misi?",
And who ask "ma a chistu cu u manna?".

The second question takes little to answer, explains Fo himself, Eni sends it
because we need to look at the city with different eyes. And what does this
six-legged intellectual come up with? He convinces some schools in the city, with
the terrible complicity of the teachers, to hire students to remove the ugliest
images from Google searches in Gela. Hundreds and hundreds of colorful, cheerful,
cloying photos are loaded in their place, in order to attract possible tourists
and in any case give a positive version of one of the ugliest and most tormented
cities in Sicily. The titanic effort lasts for just a few days, then the news and
the truth take over again.

Faced with this (in) success, Jacopo Fo tries again and relaunches, inventing a
sparkling site that has an evocative title, "Freeze the roots of the future". It
is a container that serves to do "relaunch and territorial promotion", again, in
which there is a bit of everything: the seven wonders of Gela (even), 3 seasons
of a web-series on Gela (in reality they are interviews with some local people
and as there were no askari who lent themselves to this farce, in a series there
is one of the creators, his wife, best friend and his priest), the "Sicilian
quality" stamps that are given "to the" more deserving initiatives for the
support they give to culture, economy, eco-sustainability and the image of the
city, according to the assessments collected by the project team ". Perhaps aware
that he must justify to Eni why the company turned to someone who is more of an
improviser than an expert with marketing and communication, Jacopo Fo continues
to churn out initiatives after initiatives. One of the most sensational are the
"works" that still show themselves at the railway station: they are scribbles and
drawings from elementary school, designed by Fo himself, who he has the courage
to call "street-art". In reality, the six-legged intellectual had tried to
involve local artists, who had sent him to shit when they discovered that he had
the power to approve or disapprove their sketches and those in return would also
have to work for free and even pay for the necessary materials yourself. Another
time Fo made a cartoon about the history of Gela, full of so many inaccuracies
that the Gelese artist Giuseppe Brugioni needed various articles to disprove and
dismantle them one by one. My favorite episode remains the one in which in one of
the episodes of the web-series one of the protagonists was immortalized while he
was running around with his motorbike on the dunes of the beach, which are
protected by European standards: it took the recommendation of a politician of
the Cinquestelle so that the crew realized they were spreading a criminal offense
and took the entire interview off the web.

Worse than Jacopo Fo, then, there are those who lend themselves to companies of
such depth: sometimes they are useful idiots, who, however, always arouse a
little anger because after 60 years of Eni's presence they still haven't
understood what propaganda consists, more often they are childish profiteers who
still beg for attention and alleged shop windows. It is really true, as Victor
Hugo said, that there are people who would pay to sell themselves. In an article
on Jacobin I used the expression "cultural washing", mimicking greenwashing, that
is, the environmentalism of the facade, which seemed to me an apt definition to
indicate the cultural mystifications paid by the industries in the Sicilian sites
that they devastated. For Fo it is an excessive definition: his are cultural
bullshit, neither more nor less. As the Gelese artist Giuseppe Brugioni recalls,
the money that Eni pays to Fo and that even some local accomplice collects, is
the consideration for the dead and the sick and the sacked by those who destroyed
the city.

Since I am a little sorry that Eni wastes the money in this way, also because it
is still partly taxpayers' money given the presence of the state among the
shareholders of the company, at the last meeting of the six-legged dog I
expressly asked how much it was cost so far these cultural bullshit and if it
were not considered appropriate to cut the funds. Eni replied saying that the
project "aims at urban redevelopment starting from what the city offers in terms
of attractions, including those still unexplored. The protagonists of the project
are Gela and its inhabitants: institutions, schools, associations, students,
young people, the elderly and professionals who get involved to promote the image
of the city ". Understood? They are the people who have to get involved,
according to Eni and Fo. It goes even worse with the second part of the answer.
"The partnership, which has the patronage of the Municipality of Gela, was
developed through various agreements of variable annual value in relation to the
contents and related benefits recognized to Eni". If there were still doubts
about the question "who are these cultural bullshit for", it is the company
itself that provides an answer.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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