Born in the early twentieth century in Uruguay, the murga soon was overtaken in Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires, during carnival, to break with normality, subvert the rules. So as the slaves made fun of the bosses by wearing a tailcoat, the classic dress of lords,  so the murgueros chose  tails  as their "uniform", by reinventing it and colouring it. Then they added an hat and gloves, other symbols of wealth. It is today a form of street theater which combines music, song and dance.  In Rome , about ten years ago, was founded the first Italian murga , called "Sin permiso". The murga is a peaceful criticism on society and politics.

The murga consists of a dance troupe, a band of percussionists and a group of singers who, by their actions and their words, criticize with sarcasm the politics and the society.  Nuclear energy, public water, even the Arab-Israeli conflict, all can be represented. The murgueros become the mouth for many social causes. A protest that takes place in a peaceful manner A typical motto is: “with bumblebee we will do more noise than with bombs. As such is used also by protesters in Rome against the high velocity trains in Northern Italy, the so-called NO-TAV as seen in this gallery. This way protesters wish also to demonstrate their pacific opposition to the High Velocity Project that is usually opposed with very harsh fights.

 

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Expo 2015 is the next scheduled Universal Exposition after Expo 2012, and will be hosted by Milan, Italy, between 1 May and 31 October 2015. This will be the second time Milan hosts the exposition, the first being the Milan International of 1906, of which the old structures remain but undergo a demolition/reconstruction these months.

The theme chosen for the 2015 Milan Universal Exposition is Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life. Embracing culture, traditions, technology, innovation and creativity and how they are related to food and diet. Expo 2015 will further develop themes introduced in earlier Expos (e.g., water at Expo 2008 in Zaragoza) after the view of new global emerging issues, with a main focus on the right to healthy, secure and sufficient food for all the world’s inhabitants.

Images in this gallery tell the city of Milan in the period very close to the opening of the Expo 2015, the new district of Porta Nuova, the still unfinished structures and buildings, the sites where old buildings of the ‘900 exhibition undergo a demolition and are replaced by modern infrastructures, finally some shots on the downtown of

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From chapter 2 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

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Alang is the largest ship recycling yard in the world, a kilometres-long expanse of sites where gigantic carcasses of ships are waiting to be disassembled by hand-workers, who recycle parts and components. Here are employed about 40000 workers, as much as a medium town. It’s a dirty, dangerous, exhausting and deadly job. They climb on these metal giants that stay torn apart and half-cut into the sea. They handle oxyhydrogen flames throughout the day, the air is unbreathable and saturated of combustion gasses, of oils, lubricants and acid fumes, the air is pungent, stinging, it burns the eyes and the nose. Here as elsewhere the workers are poor labourers coming from agricultural areas even poorer than here, like Bihar, Assam, Orissa, West Bengal or the neighbouring Pakistan, they flee from hunger, do not have any formal training to deal with toxic materials, are willing to make this life for the equivalent of a few euros per day. For this little money they are daily exposed to arsenic, lead, contaminated by asbestos, all of which under deafening noise. In the closer village people live by sheep farming and by a related industry (recovery and distribution of spare functioning pieces of the ships). It’s like stepping back 200 years when you exit the shipyards and visit the village. But even here the pollution is terribly high.

Scrap materials, however, are a big business and thanks to cheap Indian labourers a too little costly one, and these environmental risks are not taken into any account. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey are the homes of the world’s shipbreaking facilities. Every year the shipping industry sends around 600 ships of all types to be dismantled on their beaches. Workers here are totally unqualified, having very little education and are thus easy to be exploited. Workers are being provided neither with the adequate training nor with the equipment to work in such a dangerous and toxic environment, although shipbreaking is considered by the International Labour Organisation as one of the heaviest and most hazardous occupations in the world. Their general living conditions after migrating to the yards are extremely bad. Every year thousands of workers are the victims of deadly accidents at the yards of India, Bangladesh and other shipbreaking countries. The working conditions are extremely bad and safety measures hardly exist. If the shipbreaking workers don’t die or get seriously injured because of an accident, they suffer a big risk of falling ill or dying from toxic waste-related diseases.

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    Here we present the synopsis from chapter 6 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

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India today exists on a multiple level including high industrialization and traditional farming communities, and this leads to a growing social gap. Talking about preindustrial society would make more than a historian upset, but this is exactly what is to be seen. Farming communities that are still in the preindustrial era, which do not know the use of machines to work in the fields and do not participate to modern life. These villages are obviously not impenetrable by modernity, which comes in the form of objects that elsewhere would be considered trash or waste. They don’t ignore what is in their surroundings. Their culture and way of life, however, are anchored to a preindustrial scheme and so are traditions, familiar and social networks, so the rules of the village and the religious codes. The people of these villages are not educated nor culturally prepared to face the challenges of the modern world in which they are increasingly going in contact. They are not able to understand the choices made at the top, by the governments, nor to politically organize themselves as a pressure group, despite the democratic principle guaranteed by the Indian system: “one man, one vote.” These communities suffer more than others the strong government interferences as a mediator of the multinational enterprises that would induce villagers to abandon traditional sustainable farming and to adopt intensive farming and OGMs. There is an invisible struggle that these villages face every day against very powerful enemies.

Despite being a desert region, Rajasthan is an area where water is abundant due to the monsoons. In the centuries the need to manage a resource on a seasonal base has created a true culture for water that is not only declined in the sacredness by which in this country waterways are venerated but also and especially into complex hydraulic systems that already the British did not completely understand and let them deteriorate. Rain is also called ‘megaphusp’ (flower of clouds) and there are at least 25 names that refer to as many hydraulic systems for irrigation and drinking water and made Rajasthan the most flourishing desert on earth. Throughout its ancient history there is not a single description of this desert as a barren and desolate land. Obviously these systems do not require electric pumps or fuel and allow villages that have preserved them to overcome the drought affecting on contrary the “modernized” villages. Traditional crops and irrigation systems have been first attacked by the so-called “green revolution”, which included monocultures of species that require a lot of water, fertilizers and pesticides; then by the large water constructions, financed by the World Bank, that have depleted aquifers. People travel miles to find a source of drinking water and it is a tragic reality that someone at home opens the taps and in a few minutes consume as much water as during one of those trips.

 

 

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The "Anti-Racist Mediterranean " is a sporting  artistic and cultural event, whose first edition was held in Palermo in June 2008. The goal of the event is the promotion of intercultural relations between the different components that live in the metropolitan city, trying to questioning dichotomies such center/periphery and inclusion/exclusion. In this historical  moment speaking about a different kind of Mediterranean is more important than ever: the riots and the desire for liberation that comes from the southern shores of the Mediterranean is presented to the public as a problem of refugees and illegal immigrants. The Western imperial barbarism, unable to read beyond its economic and commercial interests, has skillfully staged yet another bogey of a "barbarian invasion".

PROJECT 2014

The project "Mediterraneo Antirazzista 2014" will take place in the city of Naples (Scampia), Rome (Metropoliz), Genoa (S. Gottardo - Molassana) and Palermo.
The project aims to promote an intercultural vision of our society and to break the barriers of racism, hardship and degradation through sport and cultural production, intended as a vehicle of social comparison and socialization. The six previous editions have shown that the encounter and the interweaving of relationships, in fact, brings the opportunity to meet and overcome fears and prejudices, which in most cases give rise to the phenomena of social exclusion.
The seventh edition of the Mediterranean Antiracist will be divided into two parts: "Mediterraneo Antirazzista on the road" and "Mediterraneo Antirazzista 2014".

Images show the meeting and events in Rome c/o Metropoliz on 24th May 2014

For further infos: http://www.mediterraneoantirazzista.org

 

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   Here we present the synopsis from chapter 1 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

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The inequalities generated by our global economic system seem nowhere as visible as in the megacities of South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where decades of foreign and domestic investment in real estate have produced globalized cityscapes in parts of the city, while others remain entrenched in supposedly pre-modern living conditions. This produces, almost by default, the vague category of the “slum”, which becomes self-referential to nearly everything that falls outside the ambit of the high-rise, modern city.    Mumbai is the place where the greatest democracy of the world shapes its new myths of modernity and suffers with it the silent multitude of the miserable. It’s a modern and dynamic city, the largest and richest among the Indian cities, the city where half of the population does not have a house. In its typical image, the capital city is made of modern buildings that stand like islands of modernity in a dark sea of slums. There is a prevailing perception that apart from its southernmost colonial quarters, Mumbai is essentially a schizophrenic urbanscape where emergent islands of modernity are surrounded by an endless sea of informal shacks. This image of a city sharply divided between opulence and poverty is used across the political spectrum to justify redevelopment projects in the name of equality.    The true Gateway of India is its impressive net of slums spread along the railway lines, or in the neighbourhood of Dharavi, the largest slum of all Asia, which is less than a mile from Bandra West, the most chic district of Bombay, where the stars of Bollywood live. The so-called slums come from a long history related to migration flows. The first economically and culturally marginalized caste groups migrated in the 1930s - from the southern regions of the country - to this unused, marshy, mosquito-infested territory adjoining a centuries-old fishing village.

Shacks, huts, shelters, built with everything except the materials that are used for construction. Shelters that do not repair, which do not keep you warm or cool, which are useless apart from the illusion of a firm foothold on this sea of garbage. But they do respond to a precise history, that shaped the network. The habitats of Mumbai have traditionally been as diverse and heterogeneous as the city’s migratory flows. Coastal fishing villages, vernacular urban structures, grand colonial monuments, contemporary bungalows, working-class barrack-like enclaves, and modern apartment blocks have jostled for space on this tiny island through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. However, in spite of this diversity, Mumbai is usually reduced to three broad urban archetypes: the historical city, the slum, and the high-rise.    In Mumbai, the high-rise building, that ubiquitous symbol of modernization and the ultimate architectural affirmation of middle-class status, is typically presented as the answer to the organically developing, unplanned, low-rise, hyperdense, and slum settlements that are said to house 60 percent of the city’s residents. The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) and the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) projects, conducted by the government of Maharashtra, have for long pioneered the provision of housing to the poor by private developers. Only 35% of the slum dwellers seem to be eligible for the project and the government has not considered 35,000 families living on lofts and first floors. The scheme allows private developers to redevelop slum pockets with the consent of 70 percent of the “eligible slum dwellers” living in that pocket, in exchange for construction rights in more valuable parts of the city. Many faces of Bombay coexist without overlapping, from Dharavi slum up to the largest monument to modernity, a bridge of six kilometres (see above) that connects the richest parts of the city otherwise separated by the sea or the slums.       Above all a dusty, yellowish polluted wet air.

 

 

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Here we present the synopsis from chapter 7 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”.

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India is a land of extreme inequalities, with a new rich class who lives light years away from the poorest population, which is still a great silent majority. Sometimes they share the same physical space, but are connected within a logic of exploitation of labourers without any humanitarian attempt.   It is not uncommon that the same local government, which should protect the rights of the poor, it’s the one that exploits the people of poor villages or lower social classes for making jobs that are related to public services, otherwise too expensive, such as cleaning the streets or such as in the villages of Hawala, a few kilometers from the most sumptuous residences of Udaipur, these women, children and elderly, who do heavy work as a bricklayer.   These works are not only underpaid but also odd, or rather not guaranteed. If the State or a private enterprise, as in this case, has to build something, then they agree with the village’s chief and the community organizes itself. Women are equal to men when employed in heavy and strenuous labour, but they also have to accomplish all other matters such as child care and housing. Often these are young girls, who are already married at very early age.

Women and children of the pre-industrial villages are workers who have no qualifications or education, that means easier to be exploited and are poorly paid. Unlikely laws will ever stop this. India indeed has the world record for employment of minors.   According to estimates of the International Labour Organisation here concentrates the largest number of workers between the ages of 4 and 14 years old, about 44 millions according to their data, “only” 17 million, according to the Indian government.  In the villages, furthermore, the community survives in a limbo far away to modern society. They are organized in a collective manner and the work is done by all members, regardless of sex or age. They are often underpaid and strenuous work.   These buildings furthermore will ruin a beautiful and almost untouched natural corner a few kilometers from Udaipur, in an area around a lake that is a natural park. The logic of speculation first uses inhabitants of the areas that will soon be filled with concrete and then depletes them of the only richness that they have: the land.

 

 

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From chapter 10 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

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Hampi is a village in northern Karnataka State of India, on the banks of Tungabhadra river and within the ruins of Vijayanagara, the former capital of the Vijayanagara Empire. The city of the ancient Vijayanagara continues to be an important religious centre, housing the Virupaksha Temple, as well as several other monuments belonging to the old city. In the area is located a large number of buildings and monuments that originally belonged to the ancient city and Hampi is located in the centre of the ancient site of Vijayanagara. Ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986. The central areas of the city, which include what are now called the Royal Centre and the Sacred Centre, extend over an area of at least 40 km². The natural setting for the city is a hilly landscape, spotted by numerous granite boulders. The Tungabhadra river runs through it, and provides protection from the north. Beyond the hills, on the south bank on which the city was built, a plain extends further to the south. Large walls and fortifications of hewn granite defended the centre of the city. The city flourished between the 14th century and 16th century, during the golden age of the Vijayanagar empire. During this time, the empire was often in conflict with the Muslim kingdoms which had been established in the northern Deccan. The victorious Muslim armies proceeded to raze, depopulate, and destroy the city and its Hindu temples and icons.

Even if the empire continued to exist, thereafter it went through a slow and long decline, the original capital was not reoccupied or rebuilt. It has not been occupied since. Recently, several projects to redevelop the area have been put in place, the bazaar area that occupied the first row of columns on the sacred avenue has been reallocated. This has caused riots and protests, but it was one of the crucial steps to redevelop the area for tourism, supported by UNESCO itself. Hampi receives thousands of tourists (the last decade has been a boom time for tourism in Hampi, with the visitors on the rise from one million to 1.3 million between 2009 and 2010), but the highest percentage is made of pilgrims attracted to this holy place, not of foreign tourists. Tourism has the potential to become a resource for local development by improving living standards and rising the level of infrastructures and services, yet it can also be detrimental to the area and the society it supports. The concentration of population and of tourism activities within the most sensitive area has, in the recent past, resulted in several conflicts of varying degree and nature. Unregulated development, uncontrolled expansion of tourism activities, rural-urban migration, shifting of livelihood, changes in lifestyles, fragmentation of the social structure specially at the household level, these are the big risks.

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Ruins of the ancient city as well as temples, or what remains of them, are still inhabited places, daily used by the population and the visiting pilgrims. There are also many homeless people who sleep here, even families, you see them in the evening while preparing their simple beds made of towels and gathering around a little light or just staying under the moon. The tropical climate encourages this lifestyle and ensures acceptable outdoor living conditions, except in the monsoon season. It is an India out of time, seemingly indifferent to its modernism, simple and naive. These places are considered sacred and many go there for pilgrimage, they sleep wherever is viable. The Tungabhadra river was the lifeblood of the capital. Many well-developed channels brought water to the capital. These channels also fed cultivable areas of the walled city and beyond. The features were so advanced to be maintained by the Tungabhadra River Authority in their projects of 1950. The conservation and recycling of water had acquired enormous importance in arid areas. There were several irrigated areas within the walled city making the fortress very self-sufficient and able to withstand long sieges. Rivers and collection tanks, today as in the days of the Empire, occupy a vital role for irrigation as well as for the local ecosystem, in many regions of South India.

They are a source of drinking water for rural communities and for their livestock as for fish-farming, but also to recharge the groundwater, to control floods, etc. However, the most significant supply has drastically decreased due to various socioeconomic and institutional factors, particularly due to changes in the pattern of land ownership, caste, class configuration. Too much emphasis is given to the sewer systems and to exploitation of groundwater. These valuable resources are in a state of collapse, contributing to an increased vulnerability during drought. Vijayanagara kings were known for their (Hindu) religious patronage, and it is mostly likely that their emblems too reflects their affiliations. The Royal insignia of the Vijayanagara kings spots 4 elements: Sun, Moon, Dagger and Boar. The most unusual for an ancient Indian emblem is the image of a boar, though it is a significant symbol in Hindu Mythology. The third avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu is in the form of a boar (Varaha). The mythical layer of Hampi has some strong association with Ramayana. In the sacred cave different modern icons are to be seen: Ganesha (the elephant) and Shiva (with the trident). Symbolically Shiva is often represented with a phallic icon called Linga, it is to be found often  in front of the ancient temples.

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Just off the tourist tracks, in the countryside, life seems to be hanging at the time of the Vijayanagar. In the empire, most of the people lived on the cultivation of rice, wheat, ragi, cotton, sugarcane. There were plantations of coconut, areca and betel. The Portuguese influence introduced the cultivation of onion, tobacco and nutmeg. The magnificence of that time is lost but this is where the most important challenges for the future of the site are to be faced, which is very important from the point of view of nature and landscape conservation. Here we meet again those communities we have defined as preindustrial. They alternate with modern and crowded city, having with them commercial connections. However, the lifestyles of the poorest villages are anchored to a bygone era. The farming villages are places that are not overrun by garbage and pollution, where traditional methods are still used for irrigation, crops and pasture. Work is done by humans and animals, using a simple plow. Countryside, however, has not gone unchanged throughout the infamous green revolution.

Intensive crops, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were the ingredients of this "green revolution", sadly encouraged in many countries of the developing world. Here too, many farmers are returning to a sustainable approach to agriculture. Rice cultivation is particularly abundant and heavily dependent on monsoon and therefore on climatic factors that regulate them. One of the worst problems brought about by the policies of "development" is the introduction of eucalyptus plants (a plant native from Australia), that have literally dried up streams and groundwater. Temples and rice fields, orchards, expanses of sugar canes, reminiscence of the colonial era, palm trees and banana trees, pilgrims and sadhus, farmers immersed in emerald fields, monoliths. Visions that follow each other and rise imagination. This place undoubtedly has a unique and indescribable charm.

 

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Eastern Anatolia has always been the cradle of different ethnicities and religions. In search of the last Christians of Kurdistan, the Aramaic Christians of the Syrian church, after knocking on the doors of the few monasteries still in use in the town of Midyat, I came across quite by accident in a story unknown to the big history books. A story about a community of thousands of people who 50 years ago was brutally expelled from their lands, in the silence of the Turkish government. To get in contact with the Christian villages of Syrian culture was made possible thanks to two expatriates, respectively in Switzerland and Germany, who return each year in these lands, their land of origin, to bring basic supplies to the villages sited south of Midyat, at the border with Syria, in the heart of the mountains still partially controlled by the militias of the PKK. A story apart is the small town of Kafro, the most important centre of the community, which unlike the smaller villages, where some survivor resisted living inside homes destroyed decades ago (see photos of the elderly), Kafro was completely abandoned over 50 years ago as a result of the assault of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim peoples. Today the village is becoming an experiment of home-return by some of the many migrants who, unlike my companions, came back permanently.

In the pictures you can see the streets of the new city, the mayor and the guests visiting the modern church just rebuilt over the ruins of the one that was destroyed 50 years ago. The main church has remained in ruins (the interior is completely devastated, neither altar nor the paintings survived) On top of the mountain considered as the "Second Jerusalem by the Syrians," there is a beautiful monastery, Mor Malke, where currently only two monks reside. There are some visiting young learners. The senior priest refuses to be photographed but he tells me in detail the story of the struggle, that of the decades of abandonment after the invasion of the Islamic people, as their faith has allowed the monastery to remain almost intact. He talks about long periods of self-sufficiency thanks to the cultivated vegetable and water sources, in a very arid region where once agriculture and commerce towards Syria flourished. This was once a crossroads of peoples and rich valley. The monastery itself housed hundreds of pilgrims, today those visiting are to be counted on the palm of a hand. Photos show the meeting between the priest and the two migrants. Then, moments of the sacred ritual, where now only few people from neighbouring villages participate, a ritual made of songs and movements that recall the early Church, all people facing the altar, the priests and the common people, nobody officiating. It is not allowed to participate as external.

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Every year, on the borders of the great White Desert in the northern Khutch, in Gujarat, a gigantic ethnic festival is organized. It attracts hundreds of thousands of Indian tourists. The large region of Kutch is the home for several ethnic minorities and its tribal villages are renowned for the handicrafts made of the most beautiful and varied metals, jewellery, textiles and pottery. However, the situation in which people live in many villages is of extreme poverty. The tradition is exploited to motivate tourism which actually does not bring any benefit to the local population if not through intermediaries. In some villages, such as Khavda, the producers are able to export their wares all over India at a fair price, but the situation is very different in others.  A significant example is one village that is very close to the most visited hot-spot, a lookout over the white desert where groups of Indian tourists and school classes arrive by bus and never stop in the villages below. Here, however, is where low-cost goods are manufactured, then sold in tourist areas up to five times the cost. It is clear however what is the current aim for development: tourism. Numbers are exponentially growing, hand by hand with the growth of well-being, and statistics aside the amount of tourists not only at the sites of the desert, even for recreational activities that are organized on the reservoirs, is visible.

It is a domestic tourism, but coming from the rest of India.  All the benefits declared by the central government remain to be seen, what you see are conditions of a widespread poverty. Despite the industrial wealth of the State, the living standards of the poor are very low. These villages can be considered relatively lucky, although there are important mineral resources (excluding gas reserves, in the salt desert there are lignite, bauxite and gypsum, in particular) the government has not subcontracted land use to any multinational companies nor started any campaign of displacement. Not likely for the time being, as in other parts of India, where people are removed or harshly repressed. Many statements about development projects are done in Gujarat, in line with the model of the large dams. There are ninety-seven small rivers in the district of Kutch. Twenty large dams and several smaller dams retain water in the rainy season runoff. While most of these dams do not affect, since being on rivers that flow directly into the Arabian Sea, in others the storage of water during the rainy season, and its use for irrigation, has significantly reduced the flow of available fresh water. A mainly pastoral society does not receive great benefits from projects designed for the agriculture and the tourism, even more so if we consider the enormous costs. And the needed resources are huge.

 

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Report from one of the municipalities with the highest demand for social services in the capital

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The neighborhood of Tor Bella Monaca shows in a very large part most of the issues that afflict large segments of the population living in the suburbs of the capital of Italy. It 's a district with a unique history and specific problems, it was already born with a destiny of ghetto to house many poor families from different backgrounds and social exclusions (including many ex-prisoners) who can not afford an home and need to access the social housing.   Along with other areas of the Eighth Municipality of Rome this suburban district attracts a huge demand for social services, services which are in charge of the public administrations and of social enterprises who have contracted such a delicate task. The neighborhood has seen a lot of alarming situations and has gone into the headlines for many episodes of degradation and mismanagement, but it is a place that despite its problematic nature hides many valuable initiatives that are completely self-managed by the people, with the aim to culturally and socially re-evaluate this territory in which they live, and is often made, indeed almost always, in the absence of public institutions.

This is true in part. The Theatre of Tor Bella Monaca and other social services were possible thanks to local authorities. Government in such social frontiers like this suburb, is the only intermediate between people and municipal or national governments and oscillates between a role of single resource of vital services to citizens and at the same time acting as a serious obstacle to the full realization of important associative or private initiatives.   This ambiguity too often happens in this country, where the public affairs seem to be managed in an almost feudal manner.   Corruption is a major concern of Italy, which now lies in international rankings in positions like those of Uganda, over or around the 70th. The case of the Eighth Municipality is truly exemplary for this national moment.

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Local administration in a very non-transparent series of acts has reallocated the already limited resources for basic social services such as those for the disabled people or the not self-sufficient elders, whether are these provided in the form of home or school care whether are provided in special structures that offer a more active assistance (day care centres).   Public money is very little today but what surprises is that in times of deep crisis such as these, in this country a very unclean use of public money still can so negatively affects basic services and skilled jobs, and local administrations do not even bother to deal with the public stakeholders. In times like these, transparency should be the top priority of any political class.   Obviously there is little wonder, that's still the way it is run most of the country. In places such as the Eighth Municipality of Rome - which is so starved of vital services - corruption or the simple inability to manage public money by the political class are responsible not only for paralyzing the economy but also to bring down the welfare of entire families. Families with elderly disabled children, to whom also a minimum of welfare is subtracted.

In the stories we present here, there is also the struggle initiated by users of a cooperative enterprise in the social area, mostly elderly, disabled or in need of vital assistance. The protest is due to the sudden shift of funds for day-care centres and other services to the person, that risk to close within a few months.   Several requests to meet with politicians have never been answered, thus forcing the people to occupy the municipality to get a response from the institutions. The last occupation took place on 22 October, in fact there was a risk that within a month all funds were suspended.   In the gallery we also present some portraits of the elderly, disabled or not, in the day-care centre, where they join various recreational and training activities, which allow them a continuous social interaction and cultural stimulus what in the solitude of the home-care they could not experience.   FULL-RES EDITORIAL GALLERY >>

 

 

 

©2012 text and photos by Marco Palladino – all rights reserved

 

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Udaipur is a unique city. Located in the heart of Rajasthan, it is one of the three capitals of arts in the Indian State but also a crossroad leading to the neighbouring state of Gujarat. Its university welcomes many students from different parts of India. Economic development driven by tourism has made it home to various visual arts, with many renowned artists and photographers today even quoted in the entire country. It is also favoured by the proximity with both Delhi and Mumbai.

It is not only a tourist destination, it’s also a place chosen by the growing rich elite living in the modern and luxurious villas on the outskirts of the city. The historic centre, in the old quarter, still maintains the traditional connotations and characteristics. Several painters have painted the walls with images inspired by the traditional emblems, figures of elephants and Rajahs, and even today this tradition is kept alive by many artisans.

Udaipur homes a flourishing craft, not only paintings but also refined manufacturing of all types of metals. Walking through the narrow streets in the morning is a unique acoustic experience, the rhythm of the hammers that forge fabricated metals comes to the ears as a background music.

Just beyond the lake and canals that have given this city the abused epithet of Indian Venice, the countryside starts, set by peaks and crags, where life takes place in a whole different rhythm.

 

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© 2013 Marco Palladino – all rights reserved

 

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