On 24 May 2023, the informal settlement on the outskirts of Campobello di Mazara, which was (at least originally) built for the olive harvest, was cleared. In just a few days, bulldozers destroyed houses, small restaurants and bazaars, leaving only piles of wood and tin. On the anniversary of this event, a group of activists from “Arci Porco Rosso”, who for years have been supporting marginalised people living in ghettos like the one in Campobello, are attempting to revisit the site with an exhibition. Another attempt of reconstruction, this time imaginary, on political ruins.
Housing settlements that arise in the rural areas of southern Italy’s suburbs are always described as pockets functional to labour exploitation in agriculture. In the case of Campobello di Mazara, it mainly gathers workers for the olive harvest every year from September to November. However, the place has also attracted other people, a complex informal economy has formed around it. What really is an informal settlement? Who inhabits it, who creates it and who modifies it? Through an exhibition of “badly made photographs”, accompanied by maps, testimonies, life stories, letters, eviction notices and abandoned objects, an attempt will be made to evoke and recount a place that no longer exists and that was home to so many people.
Yaya Njie remembers the informal settlement in Campobello di Mazara. He talks about a complex organisation that provided its residents with many things they lacked elsewhere, about freedom of movement, the need to feel at home somewhere, about solidarity and economic efficiency.
The first time I was in Campobello was 2014. At that time I was still living in the SAC (note: extraordinary reception center) in Triscina, and the first time I went there there was only an abandoned ruin in Erbe Bianche that had been occupied, but not by many people, and tents around it. Sometimes I would go from CAS to Erbe Bianche just to see these people, many of them were Gambians, we would hang out for a while and drink some attaya. Then in 2017 I left Italy for a while to go to work in Malta and came back in 2019, to renew my residence permit. Sennonché in 2018 the law changed with Salvini, so renewing humanitarian protection had become much more complicated if not impossible.
In 2020 then there was covid, it was not easy to find a work contract that would allow the permit to be renewed, among other things, the police headquarters also asked me for residency, which I did not have. I rented a house in Petrosino, but they wouldn’t give me a lease, so I had to leave it. At that point I decided to go to Triscina under the square (note: an unfinished parking lot occupied at that time by a dozen people whose period of reception in CAS had ended) but I was quite stressed about all these thoughts and not finding a solution. It was hard because not having a residence permit for me especially meant not being able to freely go back to The Gambia to visit my family, and I had lost my mother.
From Triscina I moved to the settlement of Campobello, which, although it was a ghetto, for so many of us was the only place where we felt at home because we felt we were somehow part of a society. Outside the ghetto we felt all the harassment and attacks we were subjected to, so inside, on the contrary, we felt a kind of liberation. In Campobello I spent two years and from there I went to Palermo. I have lived in many different places over these years and one thing I can say: every human being needs freedom of movement, even if he is poor and has nothing in his pocket, he needs his freedom more than anything else.
In that sense, of all the places I have been, the dormitory experience for me was very difficult because, with all those rules and schedules, I must say I experienced it as a semi-prison. For example, objectively the sub-square in Triscina was much worse, from a material point of view of living conditions and I realize that, but I had so many people by my side and I didn’t feel all that pressure. Campobello was more organized, you had access to all the things I needed because there was a whole community that thought about everything: who about water, who about electricity, who about building houses, who about food… even though it was a very difficult place it was a place where people, even with the outside I mean, were connected: there was a network and there was the community that, as I said, made you feel at home.
Giulia Gianguzza (Palermo, 1988) is a social worker and activist at the Sportello Sans-Papiers of Porco Rosso and for years has focused her sociolegal support activities in the informal settlements of Western Sicily. She is also a researcher at the University of Palermo and analyzes the processes of marginalization to the detriment of ghetto inhabitants.
Yaya Njie (Fajikunda, 1997) is a peer-to-peer worker at the Sportello Sans-Papiers of Porco Rosso in Palermo. He works to support people with migrant backgrounds who are in precarious socio-sanitary conditions, such as in the ghetto of Campobello di Mazara, where he has also lived.