A river for outsiders

An analysis of the relations between an artist, his hamlet and his community

“The divine river, violated,

refuses to hold on to ancestral offerings,

and it returns them to the source...

The poet is concerned as he can sense a possible threat.

Society shrugs its shoulder with indifference,

while, wisdom invokes to seek balance." (1993 L. Lineri)

Table of Contents

Introduction...........................................................................................................1

Notes about the film..............................................................................................2

The panel...............................................................................................................2

Veneto in the North of Italy......................................................................................3

Verona.................................................................................................................... 4

South of Verona, plain in the countryside................................................................4

The great Mother....................................................................................................6

Rumours about Adige..............................................................................................8

Aquatic birds..........................................................................................................9

Overlapping shapes, undefined shapes.............................................................12

Conclusion.............................................................................................................15

Bibliography.............................................................................................................16

Appendix..................................................................................................................17

Map 1.......................................................................................................................17

Map 2.......................................................................................................................17

INTRODUCTION

Luigi Lineri is an artist who climbed down the river's banks looking for himself. He is

studying shapes left by his ancestors: he is tidying them up and he is placing them into a

primordial alphabet; a primordial way of speaking. He preferred the silence of the

riverbanks instead of the noisy village.

These shapes are not just sculptures left from the ancestor but also they were part of a

ancient propitiatory rite: they have been thrown into the water when shepherds wanted to

cross the river. He has started collecting pebbles from the river bed more than thirty years

ago and during his research he noticed repetitive shapes. His intuition was that the

pebbles were made on purpose by his ancestors. Each shape tells something about

himself and his society, in this case called collectivity. According to him, in order to

understand our origins and our collectivity, we should get closer to the river where many

other past societies used to live.

I listened to his advice: I went down into the riverbed in order to understand my homeland

better and I shot a documentary. I spent time in the wild nature of the Adige River banks, I

met few a people, I met animals and many insects; afterwards I went back to the village

where the collectivity lives.

My essay will be structured in three parts. First, I will illustrate the countryside of Verona, a

small city in the north of Italy, where the Adige river passes. This will introduce the

historical, social, cultural and religious background of this area, including the role of the

River, its functions and how people relate to it.

The second part will introduce Luigi Lineri. Beside as an artist he is also an outsider of his

community. Here I will provide a small description of the other outsiders in my film. In my

writing I will follow his advice: every chapter will be associated to a pebble's shape, which

represents a part of our (Luigi's and mine) origins.

The third part will be an attempt to explain the difference between space/place and why

the Adige river is a place.

NOTES ABOUT THE FILMS

My first Idea was to shoot a film about Luigi Lineri. In order to shoot this film I spent a huge

amount of time along the river, and while I was there I met the other characters. I realised

that Lineri artwork is deeply connected to the place where he lives and I could not really

separate him from his hamlet. In order to explain better the place, in the editing, I

combined the story of Lineri with the stories of other people to complete the depiction of

the River and its neighbourhood.

THE PANEL: Place and neighbourhood

He gathered together all the pebbles he found, placing them in a specific order. There are panels

which contain pebbles in fish shape or others with the human face. Every single pebble has its own

place in his artwork.

Culture has similar etymological roots with places. In fact the Latin world for culture is

cultūra, which also means plantation, education, respect/care and worship. Cultūra comes

from the verb cŏlĕre = to till, tend, care for, cultivate. The link between land and human

action is blurred when we use the latin term cŏlĕre (www.dizionario-latino.com). "To be

cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficently intensely to cultivate it –to be

responsible for it, to respond for it, to attend to it caringly" (E. S. Casey,1996). According to

Casey, once we have started cultivating a land, it becomes cultural. In a sense human

action turns the wild land into a cultivated land. From the Latin term cŏlĕre we can grasp

the links between places and the human settlement that occurs in it. It can be said that the

historical social background of a place is related to the soul of it. As M. Fois (2010)

explained:

"We have been knowing it for a long time: places have a soul. We know it. We know that inside the

beating heart of a place there is a voice echoing. We know that the breath of earth produces

messages, complains and scoldings."

The places where our ancestors used to live and build their houses are not random places.

The choice of building a church or a house came from the wisdom of places. Places are

filled with memories, wisdoms, voices and stories woven between territory and society. For

these reasons I believe it is important to trace a background of the history of the Adige

river and its surroundings.

Veneto in the North of Italy (See map1 in the appendix).

The place I am writing about is located in North of Italy where, after the Second World War,

most of the industrialisation happened. Veneto was a rural region for decades. In the last

40 years the industries transformed the appearance of landscape. Now is one of the most

productive lands for agriculture. This is due the biggest plain of the country is located here.

From a historical point of view this region used to be a poor area especially after the

Second World War. This is the main reason why Veneto became a land of migrants. At the

beginning of the 1900 a great migration took place, many Italians from Veneto, Friuli

Venezia Giulia and other southern regions moved to Brazil, Argentina and USA.

From a political and social point of view, Veneto has always been conservative. The term

“conservative” needs further explanation.

The strongest party and the most approved in Veneto after the Second World War was

Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrat party). It was a strong party between the huge

amount of rural people, middle class and entrepreneurs. Its principal goals were: fighting

the possibility of nostalgic fascist parties and fight the danger of totalitarian communism.

Apart from the controversial events happened during these twenty years, what is important

to me in order to describe Veneto is the fact that “demochristian” ideologies and values are

deeply seated in people's mind. These ideologies are a combination of catholic

conservative ideas (almost bigoted), middle class standard of living and provincialism of a

small city. For a deeper analysis about “Gli anni di piombo” (Italian period of political

turmoil, 1970s to early 1980s) read 2006 Gabriele Turi.

Verona

It is a small city in Veneto of 206.7 km2 and 264,191 inhabitants (www.treccani.it).

Verona can be said as an extremely provincial city because it developed a lot in its

countryside. The rural area is usually a place where people are more attached to old

traditions than in the city centre. On the other hand the urban areas are more open to

innovations and changes. In Italy the fragmentation of policies and belonging to different

political organisations is part of the people's daily lives. Dario Fo, an Italian actor-

playwright, comedian, singer and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature said in an

interview "In Italy everything is political or related to policy, even what someone is having

for lunch" (film “A Nobel for two” 1998).

For these reasons, I will explain further about the political history in this city.

As I said Veneto used to belong to a conservative/right wing, but during the last 15 to 20

years a other party arose. Its name is “Lega Nord”, still conservative/right-wing yet more

extreme. Its main aims are: independence of the North Italy from the south, the creation of

a federal state where each region has more economical independence. It is a nationalist

party as they have been fighting for years against the clandestine immigration in Italy and

now is anti-European Union. These ideologies, when extreme, may result in racism.

Despite of this, most of the people in Verona support this party. In my observation, this

has happened due to the fact that very few people from Verona travel which made

them narrow minded. This means that a very small number of people had the chance to

face other way of living. The confrontation with “the others” is still a benefit for a few

people. More events and initiatives are happening also more people started travelling

around the world. The community plays a very important role in my work because all the

characters in my film has had a peculiar relation with the society.

South of Verona, plain in the countryside (see map2 in the appendix)

When travelling from the city centre to the south of the city, it is easy to find a large number

of fields and cultivated lands. This includes other wild parts of the land, especially

beside the Adige River. The farther you go from the town, the less events and social life

you will find. Usually people from the countryside are more conservative, and the Catholic

religion plays an important role. Each small village has at least three huge and ancient

churches. In the past, these places were just rural. Nowadays the difference is that people

have the possibility to drive wherever they want and they can easily reach the city centre.

“This is a land of farmers and rural people even if recently they became rich and they don't

work as a farmer any more” (Interview with Vito, 2014).

THE GREAT MOTHER

The river Adige

“la mare” (the mama)

mother of fish

mother of birds

mother of human being

mother of celestial bodies

unclear fairy

acephalus

womb

pubis

tights

snout and body

egg

(Lineri, 1993)

The river is always there, many generation passes but the great mother is still there. The

pulsating river keeps flowing.

Cities grown besides the riverbed usually places the river as the centre of most activities

such as trade, communication, transport or irrigation. The Adige river was no different.

The Latin name of this river is Athesis: the pronunciation is very close to the dialect

“Adese”. Mozzo (2014:5) considers this link as a direct bridge between the

contemporaneity and the past. He says “it is a river which cross lands and centuries and

leaves a mark in both of them.” He believes that after the massive overflowing of the river

in 1882, which caused damages and destroyed a huge part of the city and the countryside,

people started to distance themselves from the river. They had to build walls,

embankments, barriers and dams to keep the city safe. Mozzo claims that this became a

barrier, a border between the river and the people's mind.

The Adige river has been for many years a source of sustenance, work and prosperity.

First of all it has been a route for communicating in both trading and culture. With the

Republic of Venice, until the XVII century, the Adige reach the highest level of its

achievement. It was common to see a raft of trunks going from the countryside of Verona

to Venice as it was a way of transporting wood, which was very useful in Venice. The

navigation was also made in the opposite direction, from the sea to the mountain.

Everything was travelling in the river: materials, foods, goods, people, ideas, words and

stories.

A lot of people used to work along or on the river. For example the “Giararoi” were the

people who used to work extracting sand and gravel. They used to do it by hand, it was a

very hard job to do. Other workers were the “Barcaroli”, boatmen who used to connect the

two banks of the river. Fishermen, hunters, water-mill workers, almost everyone found

their source for life in the river.

The river was also the only swimming area for lots of people before the mass

culture of summer tourism. No one in these countrysides had the chance to swim in the

sea. The only way of swimming or spending time in the water was bathing in the river. After

the tourism started, more and more people stopped going to the river.

Mozzo (2014:8) believes that during the 1800 the river starts his slow decadence. The

Republic of Venice ended and most of the transportations stopped. During the 1900 many

dams were built and the navigation also the fishing activities became almost impossible.

Nowadays the river is still used for irrigation of plantations, but nearly nobody uses as a

route any more. Very few people go fishing as well; it is an abandoned and wild place.

If you travel in the river you can easily see lots of bell towers, and each bell tower

represents a village or a hamlet. The faith of the people who live in the small cities along

the river is proved also by their name. It is always associated to a saint (Such as San

Giovanni =St. Giovanni) and there are also a big number of churches (Mozzo, 2014: 17)

Rumours about Adige

While I was filming my final film I often wondered why is this place so abandoned even

though it is located to a very developed and high density populated part of Italy. People do

not navigate on it anymore, do not work there and do not even spend time there. On the

other hand, few decades ago, the river was the centre of everything. What changed? Why

now the river is described as disgusting and dangerous by lot of people? It seems that the

perception of the river keeps changing for centuries. In the modern era a lot of people

prefer to go on holiday and spend their spare time in big tourist centres where there are

facilities, amusement parks, restaurants and clubs. Even if the river is 10 minutes far from

their house, the majority still prefer to drive to go the sea for the week. However, the road

towards the river is not comfortable as a paved road is. In order to reach the water, the

only possibility is walking through the tall grasses, between nettles and thorny plants. In

the past, both banks were totally clean, due the great amount of people who were working

there and navigate in the river. Currently there's a law which doesn't allow anyone to cut

down its trees or plants.

Nature is always been both ungenerous mother and a caring mother, and the river is both

of them. Listening to people's stories I found that many people died in the river: this

happened because of different reasons, such as overflowing, inability to swim, cold and

strong streams. As a result of these misfortunes in the past, lots of people are now scared

of the river water and keep distance. It is common to consider this river very dirty even if it

is not (see “Stato delle acque superficiali del Veneto. Corsi d'acqua e laghi. Anno 2011.

Rapporto tecnico"). Every three years the council controls the quality of the water and the

result of this research comes with a grading system for the quality of the water, which are:

1- high; 2- good; 3- passed; 4-mediocre; 5- very bad. Both the Garda lake and the Adige

river Adige reached the second level, so this means that both of them are good. I place

Garda Lake as a comparison because it is in Verona and when people decide to take a

day off, it is a very common place to go. It is the biggest lake in Italy and a tourist centre

full of hotels, clubs, pubs and facilities. The river itself increased its grade from the

previous inspection. So stating the river to be dirty due to mice, otters, and polluted does

not make sense. Another reason of the fear of the river may be the presence of immigrants

or other bizarre people. Most of the people believe that over there it is easy to find some

criminals or other people who use drugs, but this is controversial. Sometimes lots of

people define immigrants as criminals because in Italy immigration is still a new

phenomenon. There is confusion between criminals and different people/ marginal such as

immigrants or Roma/gipsies. This happens also because the political party previous

mentioned, “Lega Nord”, plays an important role among the society. They made an

enormous propaganda against immigrants (more information in L. Dematteo 2011).

Another important reason of not going to the river is the fascination of the elsewhere. They

prefer to travel across tropical lands, new cities or other countries instead of discovering

the closest places. The greens around the river are mostly used as places for doing sports

or jogging, nearly nobody goes there just to enjoy water and nature.

So, which are the reasons of this estrangement from the river? Welcoming and hostile,

source of life and abandoned, aggressive and peaceful. The river may be defined with

these terms and their opposite.

AQUATIC BIRDS

“Connected to water.

Connected to air.

Connected to myth.

Alien in water, alien in air.”

The “outsiders” are closer to the water more than anyone else.

The anthropologist Gabriele Mina (2011) has the project of collecting and describing the

work of a specific group of artists. He calls them “babel builders”, and most of them build

“fantastical architectures and irregular universes” in Italy. They usually fight against their

community to survive or to keep creating their artwork. They struggle to live in their society

trying to “build their utopia between accumulation and collapse” (Mina, 2011:9).

Community and social conventions play an important role in the society of this specific

group of artists, and also in their artwork. These artists are usually eccentric and they want

to do everything with their strength. They keep distance from the society itself and usually

the society doesn't look at them as artists. Most of them use what they find in nature or

recycling materials. Mina thinks that they are both anthropologists and performers (2011:

20). They are anthropologists because they interpret the world through their artwork and

they are performers because they have committed their life to their artwork (usually they

create the artwork for their community even though they keep distance from other people).

These artists started working at the beginning of the 1900. It is a new current and might be

related to the changes between territory and materiality. With the industrialisation there

were a great amount of waste materials: wood, plastic, cement, gravel, sands, everything

was felt differently.

Luigi Lineri is described as part of these groups of artists, he has been collecting pebbles

for more than thirty years. He started because he was interested in ancient flints. While he

was collecting he quickly noticed repetitive shapes among flints and pebbles as well. He

had an insight: ancestors in the past would have chisel and made all of these shapes as a

rite and then threw them into the water when they wanted to cross the river as a sign of

good luck. Now he wants to save these shapes; he “must do it” even if he doesn't really

know why.(From interview with Luigi Lineri 17 th of May 2014). The shapes he classifies as

a symbol of the past and the origins of the place where he lives. Human faces, masculine

phallus, aquatic birds, fish, sheep,dog, horse, the great mother, feminine symbol, pig, cow,

tools, these are the most important shapes for him. As Lineri stated (from interview with

Lineri 14th of May 2014):

“It doesn't really matter if my research is true from scientific points of view. I just believe that I must save

these shapes; and I want to do it for my community. It doesn't matter if most of the people don't

understand. ”

I spent lot of time along the river in order to get nice shoots of the water, and I quickly

realised that the people I met over there are all connected in a way. They are all marginal

people.

For example, the vagabond that decided to leave his country and started to travel all over

the world yet he doesn't want to visit the cities. He just wants to spend time in wild nature.

He started travelling after a tragedy in his life occurred. His wife and kid died in a car

accident and he was left alone. “I am a vagabond, not a traveller” he kept saying, “ the

difference is that we like nature, we need to stay in nature to survive” (from interview with

the Vagabond, 2014). He usually does not work; he collects fruits and vegetables from

plants and goes fishing in the rivers he finds. He has decided to live life in a different way

from what modernity offers.

Damiano is a meditator who is not in the film, but I think he helps completing the depiction

of the river itself. I met him for the first time when I went to shoot the sunset. He was

spending time with his girlfriend along the river, they were both meditating. Damiano is

seriously ill with diabetes and Alexadra, his girlfriend, is from Romania, has some troubles

with her bones. They told me whole story about how did they start mediating and how did

they meet each others. “When you are sick, when your wedding fails, when you lose your

job... there is nothing you can do. You just have yourself as last option. We found

meditation as a redemption from sickness, poverty and death.” (from Interview with

Damiano and Alexandra of the 9th of May). The place they choose for meditating is the only

peaceful area around Zevio, their village. They also told me that the flowing of the river

makes them sharing their thoughts with the entire nature. They need nature to practise

their meditation. Their way of reacting to illness is very unusual. People usually do not find

refuge in nature in these countryside of Verona: instead they keep distance from it and

they trust doctors and hospitals most. Their condition of being outsiders made them spend

time along the riverbanks alone, meditating and discovering something about themselves.

It seems that modernity persuades us to spend more time with people instead of spending

time with ourselves.

Moktar, the homeless from Tunisia, on the other hand, ended up in this situation without

his willing. He had a job but after his injury, his boss gave him the boot. The Italian law

prescribes a disability pension for on-the-job- injured people. Yet due to corruptions, black

labours or jobs without contracts, people sometimes do no apply this laws. There are

many unclear points in his interviews, but it is clear that he does not have a house to stay

or money to live. He lost his trust in people or institutions, and now he is spending time

alone along the river.

The majority of the city's community does not talk with these marginal people. The

outsiders simply seemed dangerous or wired. I might say that the “outsiders” react to pain

and sorrow in a similar way. The Adige river somehow attracts these kinds of people more

than others.

OVERLAPPING SHAPES, UNDEFINED SHAPES

places and people are like overlapping shapes.

Blurred borders.

Stratifications.

Confusion.

Exaggerated beauty.

Contrary.

Interlocked.

Labyrinth.

(Lineri, 1993)

“sense of places and belonging”

Places, like voices and time, are political, social and cultural construct. They are not inert

containers, they are local and multiple as well as voices. They are forged of culture and history. For

each inhabitant a place has a unique reality. (Rodman, 1992)

Rodman (1992) also wrote that understanding social constructions about space and place

could empower place conceptually. It is important to gain understanding about the relation

between a group and its spaces in order to have a more complete idea of it.

Even in total stillness, places may seem to speak, and sometimes they only express what

their animators enable them to say. There is a difference between space and place. M.

Augè (1995) defines places as a relational, historical and linked to identity; while spaces

are the opposite. In fact different people will perceive a place different ways. A place is

what people think and feel about the place, its history, its origin and identity. In the

supermodernity (Augè, 1995: 96) of our society there are spaces where individuals meet

without being in touch. Non-places do not have any identidarian or historical relations with

people. Example of these places are airport, luxurious five stars hotel, shopping centre,

public transportations and refugee camps: he claims that everyone of these bring us to

alienation (Augè, 1995:97).

Nowadays supermodernity changes our perception of spaces, places and time. We have

now a huge number of non-places where we go weekly. Yet, how does it change our life?

How did non-places change life of the south of Verona's countryside? How does people

feel about places and non-places now?

First of all the Adige river is for sure a place because is plenty of identitarian and historical

relations. Going back to the Latin meaning of cŏlĕre, I would say that the ancient human

settlement beside the Adige river makes this place sacred because the origin of this

society has its roots in it. I might say that people are, little by little, abandoning places in

order to spend time in non-places. Non-places seems to give people false security and

false sense of community. Augè (1995: 98) explained fully in his book the danger of a

humanity living and spending time in non-places and which seems agreeable.

Supermodernity are pushing us to abandon places. Lineri's artwork is an attempt to drive

us back to our origin, the river where in the past the whole collectivity used to live and

spend time.

I would say that the supermodernity has change our way of relating with place and non-

places. Augè (1995:32) said that in biggest metropolis we spend most of our time in non-

places and this may affect our life, making us feeling lonelier. This seems to have

happened in the countryside of Verona as well. Even if these villages are very small, most

of the people now prefer to spend more time in non-places than in places. I had the feeling

that the Adige river is a place of memory, being there means almost spend time with

ourselves, far from any bars, pubs or other crowd spaces. Places consist in what we get

from them, in which feelings we perceive from them. As K. H. Basso stated (1996:56)

“As natural reflectors that turn awareness to the source from which it springs, places also provide points from

which to look out on life, to grasp one's position in the order of things, to contemplate events from

somewhere in particular”

The important thing is the point of view: the mass states that there is nothing to do in the

countryside of Verona since there are no cool pubs or others. On the other hand few

people found the same place as great inspirational locations where stay can in peace and

build their artwork or simply survive. Lineri said (from interview with Lineri, 2014) “ we don't

need to go far away to find ourselves”, and I add: it depends how we look at everything

around us.

CONCLUSION

Lineri found himself in his artwork, his creativity allows him to find human and animals'

shapes in pebbles but also to save himself. With his courage he built a great artwork in

place where not many people would appreciate it. He is digging into himself and in his

territory in order to re-evaluate it. I may say that he had the chance to see his home town

differently thanks to his different point of view. Life of people, nature and places are woven

together. Lineri is telling us the story of his land and with these overlapping shapes, he is

teaching us how to look at everything around us. He is teaching us that there are holy

animals such as fish and sheep, which helped his ancestors surviving. He is teaching us

that fish gave his ancestors food and we should be thankful for that. He is saying that

nowadays there are not much fish and we should be concerned about it. He is telling us

that the river is the great mother: thanks to her, everything was created and it is better not

to mistreat her. She is giving back all of the offerings that our ancestor made in the past as

a warning. As we know she is a mother and she loves us but she is also able to scold us.

Bibliography

Augè, Marc 1995 Non-places London

Basso, Keith H. 1996 Wisdom sits in Places in Senses of Places edited by

Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, New Mexico

Casey, Edward S. 1996 How to get from space to place in Senses of Places edited by

Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, New Mexico

Dematteo, Lynda 2011 L'idiota in politica. Antropologia della Lega Nord, Feltrinelli

Fois, Marcello 2001 Dura Madre Einaudi editori

Lineri, Luigi 1993 Adige, un fiume di memorie Pierluigi Perosini editore Verona

Mina, Gabriele 2011 Costruttori di babele Elèuthera editore

Mozzo, Marco 2014 Lungo l'Adige tra argini e ponti Scripta edizioni Verona

Rodman, Margaret C. 1992 Empowering place: mutilocality and multivocality in American

anthropologist

Rosi, Daniela 2011 “Luigi Lineri. La forma salvata” in Costruttori di babele Elèuthera

editore

Rosi, Daniela 2010 Forme solitarie per un'armonia collettiva myriad pro, adobe caslon pro,

grafiche siz spa, Verona

Turi, Gabriele, 2006 Il nostro mondo: dalle grandi rivoluzioni all'11 settembre Roma editori

Laterza

Websites

http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/democrazia-cristiana/

http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/verona/

http://www.arpa.veneto.it/temi-ambientali/acqua/file-e-allegati/documenti/acque-

interne/acque-superficiali/RAPPORTO_ACQUE_2011.pdf

http://www.dizionario-latino.com/dizionario-latino-italiano.php?lemma=COLO200

Films

A Nobel for two, Franca Rame and Dario Fo 1998 by Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo

Interviews

interview with L. Lineri 14th of May 2014

interview with Damiano and Alexandra 9th of May 2014

interview with Vito 4th of June 2014

interview with Teo, the vagabond 21st of May 2014

Appendix map 1

Appendix map 2