Luca Vitone talks with Tiziana Casapietra about the research he has done for his video “Per l’Eternità” which you can also watch on this website at the link.
In order to come to the idea of a smell, I had to conduct many interviews with the people living in the areas with Eternit (the harmful material made out of asbestos). The stories I have heard are violent and shocking.
I went to Casale Monferrato (Northern Italy), where an Eternit Industry has been located for many years. There I got to know members of the association which has been gathering the families of asbestos victims. Having spoken with them, I then realized the scale of the disaster; a dramatic situation, far beyond any possible imagination.
It is a destroyed territory, where 95% of the people are contaminated by asbestos and there is an average of one death per week caused by Pleural Mesothelioma, a lung cancer often diagnosed in people who have been exposed to high levels of asbestos. The death rate will sharply increase in the coming years, because the infection due to asbestos fibers settled in the lungs has now reached the end of the incubation period (20-30 years). I have heard dramatic stories of decimated families.
The territory around the industry has been totally contaminated. There is a beach along the Po River, now hidden by a sarcophagus made of reinforced concrete and totally covered in vegetation. This beach is made of the industry’s debris: a mixture of cement, sand, and asbestos fibers. For decades, persons who were unaware, used the beach for sunbathing and swimming.
Children went there on Saturday afternoons or after school; many others who could not afford a holiday in Liguria or elsewhere, habitually went there for a bath. Just imagine this polluted beach, people go there to lie down and relax, they take a breath of fresh air, and perhaps, some fibers of this harmful material entered their lungs and after 20 years these people die.
The awareness of the company’s ownership (of the potential problems associated with asbestos) was confirmed by the fact that every week they were donating a liter of milk to each worker, as the belief was that milk helps to clean the lungs. In addition, the company advised the workers not to smoke, because smoking causes lung cancer. But in fact, they knew that smoke stimulates the lungs and activates asbestos fragments, thus hastening the development of the disease.
They also freely gave the waste sand to the people, who used it to pave their yards at the front of their houses. Little mountains of this sand were found literally everywhere; the wind was spreading it far and wide. As a result, people were easily inhaling it. The children were making baby food, cakes, tunnels, etc. What they did not know was that the sand was very poisonous, and by moving it these children were also breathing it. All these children who were contaminated by this material are now adults.
Tiziana Casapietra: Do they know they are contaminated?
Luca Vitone: They all know it.
TC: How do they live? Do they do medical checks?
LV: They are only waiting. Nothing can be done.
In the video, the woman who talks about the wind, she is the same one who talks about the uselessness of leaving. It isn’t worth going to Sardinia, for example, as this is something you have inside your body and after 20 years it “explodes”. It starts with a backache and cough. In this season everyone coughs sometimes and we do not care. But those who have lived in Casale Monferrato and have a cough must do some medical checks. If the cough is caused by asbestos, after 18 months you will be dead, because unfortunately, at the moment, there are no treatments for this disease. When this disease explodes you have, depending on your body type, about 18 months to live. They know it. Mrs. Marisa is alone with her son, because her other relatives are all dead. This lady knows that sooner or later that deadly cough will come, and she spends every year of her life with this fear.
I have tried to tell this story in the most poetic way possible.
TC: You managed to make a piece of poetry. By watching the video you feel pervaded by a glint of melancholy.
LV: Thank you. I like this interpretation.
I wanted to do that with 9 images.
TC: What images are they?
LV: They are images of the area nearby Casale Monferrato, from there you never see the city, the Po River is in two images, and the industry is in four, including the one with the ants.
TC: It does not look like an industry. It looks like a farmstead.
LV: Because what you see are the offices, the working places have been demolished and their debris are now collected under the concrete sarcophagus on which a lawn is grown. Our images were taken from there. When you see the third image of the factory, you also see a meadow, and we are above the factory where the people worked.
TC: Now the area is all treated? Have you gone there without any worries?
LV: I went there because I wanted to make a work about this story and I do hope I won’t have reasons to worry. But I went without permission and we passed through a net.
TC: Who made the recordings of the video?
LV: I made it with Elvio Manuzzi, a documentary maker, a collaborator and a good friend of mine. I told him what kind of images I wanted, fixed images, like photographs in video format. I got my inspiration from the holocaust filmography. In particular, there was a movie by Alain Resnais, titled Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), one of the first real documentary movies which talked about the drama of deportation and destruction of millions of people. We went to work during lunch time, at the end of June, in a time of muggy weather when the light was more disturbing. I wanted to work on some specific colors, I was thinking about the skin color of a sick person suffering from hepatitis, or the colors of soil used by Giorgio Morandi.
I have recorded hours of interviews, but I selected only a few parts when the sensation of the material emerges. At the beginning the material doesn’t emerge, the recorded voices talk about the wind, the smell, the dust, the environment. Only towards the end they started referring to death. It is a collage of voices that point to the fact that there is no solution, but coexisting with this material. This is narrated by the people who grew up in a territory where this material was the “prince” of the land.
It was also the place where workers were paid better salaries, perhaps because it was all well known already. Those who returned from the war were given the opportunity of choosing a job position: at the post office, the railway service, or the industry of Eternit. When they asked “who pays more?” The answer was “Eternit”. So they all chose the industry of Eternit. This choice caused the death of many workers.
Special thanks to Garvin Cummings, Jessica Genova, and Sidita Hoxhiq for helping with the transcription and the translation of theis interview.
© Radicate