(...) Without scruples, on 28 February, in the midst of the Coronavirus emergency – in five days 110 cases had been officially confirmed in the area, which was out of control – the Italian employer’s federation, Confindustria, launched a social media campaign with the hashtag #YesWeWork. “We need to tone it down, make public opinion understand that things are returning to normal, that people can go back to living the way they used to,” the president of Confindustria Lombardy, Marco Bonometti, told the media. The message of the promotional video for international partners was absurd: “Coronavirus cases have been diagnosed in Italy, but it is no different to many other countries,” they downplayed the situation. And they lied: “The risk of infection is low”. They blamed the media for unwarranted scaremongering, and they showed workers in their factories while boasting that all their factories would remain “open and at full capacity, as always.” Just five days later, the huge outbreak of infections and deaths arrived. It would end up being the largest in Italy and Europe. Even then, Confindustria did not withdraw the campaign, much less consider closing the factories (...) Article excerpt: Bergamo, the massacre that the employers chose not to prevent The part of Italy that was hardest hit by Covid-19 is a major industrial hub. It was never declared a danger zone due to lobbying by employers. The human cost was catastrophic. Alba Sidera Roma , 10/04/2020
Italy
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Video work "Stone/Irruption of Reality" is born from the encounter with women who are working ten and more hours per day as stone-breakers and rock-bearers over Buthan mountains' streets (North-East of India). Working women as ancient as the mountains from which they seem to break off; women whose faces convey a profound calmness, although their hands are slaughtered and their faces marked by strain. Video images are since the beginning strictly related with excited voices from New York's Stock Exchange, suggesting a deep connection between economic power and exploitation, between wealth and poverty in the world. This relation is underlined also by Master Alessandro Cipriani's sound concept, that processes stockbrokers' nervous voices into stones' noise, till it gets into a hammer's hard rhythm which beats time of these women's lives, hour after hour and day by day. Reality comes out in all its rawness and its grief.
“Fascism was just a bunch of criminals in power, but it managed to deeply transform Italy. Nowadays the opposite is true, and the power of today’s democratic regime is managing to achieve the acculturation and standardization that fascism was unable to complete. The power of the consumer society that destroys other particular realities and impoverishes the diversity of human beings.”
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