Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

Pane Amaro / Bitter Bread: Italy's New Immigrants

PAOLA FERRARIO AND MARY CAPPELLO (2001)

As little as thirty years ago, Italy was still a country of emigrants — Italians left home in large numbers to find work abroad. In the last two decades, however, Italy has experienced a phenomenal increase in its immigrant population. While legal immigrants make up less than 5 percent of the population, far fewer than in many other EU countries, a sizeable undocumented population has come to Italy with hopes of a better quality of life for themselves and their families. While these new immigrants play an important role in the economy (Italy needs to replenish a workforce depleted by the rapid aging and shrinking of the native-born population), public opinion continues to be shaped by negative media images of refugees and immigrants. As an Italian immigrant and as a grandchild to Italian immigrants to the United States, respectively, Paola Ferrario and Mary Cappello “are sensitive to and curious about the metamorphosis of our country of cultural origin into a point of destination rather than departure.” Their work is rooted in personal ties to the immigrant experience and the rituals involved in surviving loss.


PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Paola Ferrario




STORIES
By Mary Cappello


Red Cycle

Let me tell you what it’s like to wake up in your own bed, in your own house, in your own country. It’s the feeling of being egg-shaped and smooth. Of course it’s an illusion, but it holds your rib cage like a tight-fitting silk corset.


Your body is solid. None of this feeling like one wrong move and you might step off the edge of the earth, or that the corners of the room are conspiring to crowd you, or the springs in the couch are so demolished that you might not be able to get up, and you need to. You need to stand in line for hours, weeks, months in pursuit of an identity card.


“I work and I sleep, and I don’t smoke, and I’m healthy.” Some might say Maher is enterprising and fearless. So many arrivals and departures, applications and attempts, interruptions and upheavals. I can’t keep track of the rules, the complex calculus of shifting residences, of the right to work or study in different locales. Damascus Paris, Paris Moscow, Moscow Milan. No visa forthcoming. Or work. Somehow, without Italian, he made his way at midnight from the train station in Milan to his cousin’s apartment in the suburb of Rho.


He tells me how lucky he is that his father in Syria taught him the tailoring trade at six years old. In the months of June, July, and August, they would make two thousand school uniforms. How lucky, Maher explains, that he can fall back on the skills imparted by his father.


Today Maher talks to us over a quick cappuccino. It took repeated phone calls and numerous re-schedulings. He’s busy, he says, and also shy. He has dug his red motorbike out of his garage. A lone lion-faced sunflower screeches open in the square. Red rose petals have fallen to the gust of passing cars; what’s left trembles on a stem. His face is bloodless with fatigue.


“I work 10 hours a day, 320 hours a month. I have a great will to work. It’s too bad I can’t work more. I work after hours. I think there are people who just don’t want to work. I bring work home so as not to have to stop at 10 p.m. That’s why I got a backpack for my motorcycle. So I could bring work home with me.”


Maher worries the keys to his motorbike between his thumb and forefinger as he calculates, “At this point, I’m making six thousand dollars a month, one thousand of which I send home to my family in Syria.” The space between Syria and Italy contracts. His hands open to form a bridge, a pathway he imagines between the two worlds. It’s not so simple, but he expresses it in the form of parallel lines. Nothing about his inner life has changed. This, he insists. But the outer world is brighter. Nothing has changed but that he thinks in Italian. He remains Arab at core. “This world of the tailor shop, I really like. The real world is the tailor shop.” We nod and sip hot coffee on a warm day. A fountain dulls and shines as though our conversation is flapping like a shade, exposing and diminishing some truth by turns.


“Life in Italy is very easy,” Maher concludes, as he rises to go. “But I see many people, they go to work, and they don’t like it; they go on vacation, and they don’t like it; they eat, and they don’t like it.”


“I don’t understand,” he says, adjusting his helmet. “I don’t understand because life here is very easy.”


Listening to Maher makes me long for my bed back home. How I will sink deep into the cool billows of my familiar bed, even to the center of the earth. I’ll have restful dreams, and will rise brightly so as to climb the fragile stem of my egg cup, hoping never to fall.



Black Panther

In the countryside, you’re more likely to hallucinate. Is this only true from the perspective of a city dweller? Light and space and the scarcity of people conspire to fabricate mirage. Here you can make things up. You may have to adjust your eyes to the view. Today, the white web of a set of lace curtains against the cascina’s red brick are visible from the road, but in a few weeks’ time, the cornstalks will rise to block any sign of a dwelling. The landscape shifts according to the height of the corn, rising like a river to overtake the horizon line.


Pink roses against a black and white road sign remind me of the hand-tinted unreality of an Italian silent film. The earth is churned like rubble for miles. Iron and clay; giant-sized shrink-wrapped green plastic bundles; birds swoop toward hay mistaking it for a nest. Bugs bang into the windshield.


Not only Italians live here now but Sikhs and Tunisians, Moroccans, and Egyptians. “These are very good people,” it is said of the Sikhs who man the dairy farms. “No Italians want to work in the stalls any longer.” Not all immigrants are spoken of as highly as the dairy farmers. Take the Tunisian whom nobody liked. “We gave him a bunch of kitchen utensils. We made an effort to be a neighbor,” one restaurateur said. “But he would do things like, like—there was a pile of sand outside of his door, and instead of removing it, he moved back and forth on it with his car until the sand was flat.” Maybe he wanted to plough and plant but felt unsure how to proceed beyond the threshold of his driveway. Dusty sirocco winds. Obscuring dunes. His Italian neighbors can’t make him out. His contract is terminated.


The cornfields claim the top story on this evening’s news. There had been talk of a black panther on the loose. Possibly a pet someone had hidden illegally in a cascina. And now it is loose, invisible in the cornfield, searching for prey. Like Poe’s orangutan in the famous tale, this panther appears to speak. People claim to have heard the panther’s cries. Has anyone actually seen it? Not exactly, but here’s a pawprint stamped into a bit of broken earth, twice the size of any dog’s.


Sometimes the new residents mistake the edge of the road and have to have their cars hauled out of a ditch. People have died this way.


In ancient Rome, imagine, a special well was designated as the place an immigrant would stop to throw a handful of earth and in this way symbolize his presence as a new citizen. I don’t know if people were thrown into the well as a form of punishment, or if anyone ever mistook the opening as a swimming hole and dove in. Worse things have happened in the history of the world.


On a train ride skirting the same countryside where our panther is said to have gone missing, I swear I glimpse a shimmering gray rivulet, studded with diamonds. But really it’s the skewed and elongated reflection of a road sign, a signal in an unknown language, a sign that I can’t read. A warning or a greeting?









banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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