2022 Genoa 2001. A Memory of the Future Genoa 2001. A Memory of the Future
At the beginning of 2020, Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi and Alice Rohrwacher began shooting a film throughout Italy, Futura, meeting boys and girls, not yet out of their teens, to listen to them talking about their dreams and visions of the future. Chance or bad omen, the film was interrupted by the pandemic of Covid-19 and because of that became an original investigation into a generation confronted with a future that suddenly appeared more uncertain. It was not however the fears of a troubled future that struck me but rather a kind of amnesia of the past that came up unexpectedly during a sequence. In Genoa, Alice Rohrwacher was talking with some high school students at the Scuola Diaz. She evoked her emotion at the memory of the tragedy of the G8 counter-summit that took place within those walls on the night of July 21, 2001. Surprised silence by her interlocutors. No-one knew the facts and the G8 only evoked vague stories of the city fortified to welcome the heads of the most powerful states in the world. She explained to them then the police raid on the school which sheltered the alternative media centre and where a hundred people were sleeping that night. One of the students seemed to remember the story of a young man who had been killed somewhere else in the city, but no doubt that man, like those who were sleeping at the school, were doing something wrong, because people are never victims of police repression without a reason. In 2021, these young people of the Diaz school, who were not born twenty years earlier, could not imagine that one could be beaten and massacred without having committed some crime, while Alice Rohrwacher, who was twenty something in 2001, cannot return to Genoa without conjuring up the images of a city transformed into a battle ground, where the police took the anti-globalisation demonstrators for the enemy. The distance between the painful memory on one side and the amnesia and ignorance on the other can be measured by this mutual incomprehension, testifying perhaps less to the difference of generation and the depolitisation of a part of the young (after all, there are no doubt other young people, the same age as these, who know all about the events of 2001) than to the conflictuality of memories and the fact that we do not inherit the same wounds nor the same history.
Return to Genoa
What stories persist of these days of mobilisation in July 2001? What memories have been transmitted? What images constitute the collective archive? Those who were there still do not know by what end they should begin their narratives. For some, Genoa was the the final flowering of a repertory of militant action as well as media and police strategies that had been sedimenting all along the counter-summits – in Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000 and again at Göteborg in June 2001, where the Swedish police shot live ammunition at demonstrators. For others, it was a disillusioned celebration that would toll the funeral bell of the antiglobalisation movement born two years earlier: “Today, we should walk back, recover the memory of the tiny Alpine paths crossed in a puerile dream of clandestines. (…) A summer in 2001. It began like a teen movie, feelings thrown onto a heap.[1]” A founding moment and a rupture, a melting point of modes of action and a trauma, a story of militant feelings and violence, Genoa was all that at the same time. Unfolding the heritage today is not an easy task, even more so because no judicial act has permitted the society to exorcise its wounds. There was indeed a “Diaz School Trial” in 2008 which condemned superior officers of the Italian police for bodily harm and falsification of evidence (Molotov cocktails were found in the school that were later proven to have been introduced by the police themselves). None of them served time, as they were exempted by an amnesty law passed in 2006. Contrary to the police, ten militants were judged and heavily condemned for having caused material dammage under a “devastation and looting” law inherited from the time of Mussolini. Among them, Vincenzo Vecchi, who lives in a small village of Morbihan and who, still today, is the object of an extradition request by Italy. But the heritage of Genoa concerns not only its protagonists, nor past events, for this history speaks of our present: that of a “strategy of tension” established as a model of social control, that of police violence which counts the numbers of dead and mutilated, that of a “battle of images[2]” which has seen lines drawn one against the other in a rhetoric of proof and complotist suspicion through the mediatic, political and judicial uses of images.
All chronology is fiction
In a book published in 2015, Mathieu Riboulet recalls the long decade of the seventies recounting several memories and journeys that founded his political and personal life. This chronology, with no other logic than that of his emotions, unrolls a tenuous thread, that of the victims of state violence. “I refuse absolutely to carry on as if nothing had happened, as if from 1967 to 1978 there had not been in the very heart of a Europe at peace this storm of violence that left the bodies of hundreds of men and women lying in the streets shot down like dogs.[3]” The historical sequence cut out by Riboulet has deeper ramifications: we could look for its origins in the experience of the Paris Commune or the Italian partisans, and probe its echoes in the Gilets Jaunes or the No-Tav movement of the Suse valley. But this fragmented and subjective chronology aims less at historical precision than at an attempt to make sense of an experience and a biographical as well as political trajectory. For fundamentally all chronologies are fictions: “Hours are not the same for everybody, chronology is a fiction. A bullet shot point blank in the middle of the street.[4]” Seconds which stretch out into durations, clashes which seem to repeat events that have already happened, images that capture by chance individual or collective destinies. In Genoa, any attempt at chronology is immediately caught up in the subjective present of testimony (where the reconstitution of facts often fails to be in tune with objective time) and in the long periods of history: the death of Carlo Giuliani, shot down by a police rifleman, re-enacted that of Giorgiana Masi, killed in Rome on May 12, 1977. The photogenic theatrics of the Tute Bianche, and the tactical rationality of the no less photogenic Black Blocs do not belong to the same registers of action and it is not without reason that the collective of Italian writers Wu Ming inscribes the battle against the G8 within a millenarian imagination and the tradition of mediaeval peasant uprisings.
A “memory of the future”
Returning to Genoa today is a way of conjugating past, present and future, for if chronologies are fictions, then they are able to reveal historical coincidences and become the objects of struggle rather than a series of monotonous consensual successions and continuities. It means reopening a colossal archive to measure the historical and political distances that separate us from that moment of “Genoa 2001” and yet which make us its inheritors. It means moving back in time from the fixation of the media with the present, reducing an event to a headline and a few key words, to discover other regimes of history and divergent narratives. It means exploring a visual body of material that is conjugated in several tenses: for these images form what Michel Foucault called a “memory of the future[5]”. If they allow us to reconstitute exactly each day’s events, to map the route of the various processions, enabling us even to following the movement of an individual (Francesca Comencini, in her film devoted to Carlo Giuliani retraces hour by hour the young man’s day from photos and videos), they engage simultaneously a vaster and more complex vision than the official narrative: no, they say, Genoa was not a celebration sabotaged by violent militants who overwhelmed the police. All these images show the irreducible nature of the event. All of them resist interpretation. After Seattle in 1999, the G8 counter-summits were the first in Europe to be saturated with devices capable of recording images. Instead of constituting a set of testimonials and evidence, these images have delineated a new space of protest, in which the contradictory versions of the demonstrators and the police battle it out, and even within the demonstration, the proponents of a legalist and pacifist strategy against the others.
Returning to Genoa means probing these images and the contradictory narratives they sustain, attempting to move beyond the effect of amazement to understand their real and symbolic uses on the judicial and political scenes where they were summoned – and very often failed – to shed light. The iconographic corpus surrounding the death of Carlo Giuliani requires this kind of viewing experience: press photos and amateur videos captured the instant of the drama, compilation films, on-line archives and graffiti perpetuate the memory. The strength and the fragility of a project such as the film undertaken by Francesca Comencini in 2002 when she made Carlo Giuliani, Ragazzo is connected to the difficulty of defining a position, neither hagiographic, nor purely a documentary chronicle, but a tragedy whose narrator is a grieving mother (Haidi Giuliani) and the chorus an angry multitude. In his novel Ça change quoi? (Seuil, 2010) Roberto Ferrucci also attempts to recover memory by using his own photo and audiovisual archives as well as iconic press photos. And to ask himself: these images and these sounds, why do they substitute for our own experiences? How do they shape our deepest beings and our political choices? How do they reveal what we are to ourselves?
When, in turn, audio documentarian Adila Bennedjaï Zou returns to Genoa, where she had gone twenty years earlier with a collective, it is in the hope of elucidating the lived experience of mobilization and violence, and of what both did to the lives of those who were then in Genoa. The interview and the archive together allow us to capture something of the confused emotions that weave such an experience: love, fear, joy and anger are indistinctly mixed. If the archive acts here as a symptom, it is because it demands to be reopened, deconstructed, debated. It acts like a vernacular language whose translation must be found in a narrative, both militant and judicial. The constitution of a data bank unheard of in its size and the diversity of its formats – documentaries, militant videos, local television rushes or audio recordings of police radio – by the filmmaker Carlo Bachschmidt, can then be understood as an enterprise not of institutionalisation but of a critical rereading of this material: to collect and preserve, yes, but in order to carry out a task that the political and judicial institutions have not accomplished, reopen rather than bury the memory. What historiographical and critical issues are at stake in such an approach? To whom is it addressed? What resonances will it maintain with other stories of violence past and present? Among the most fruitful analyses of these archives, there is not only those of the Genoa generation, but also the work of young people who inherit this story in a political period of despair: this is the contribution of a theatrical play staged in 2021 by the company L’Onde, Entre les deux il y a Gênes, adapted from Gênes 01 by Fausto Paravidino (L’Arche, 2005) crossed with fragments from Mathieu Riboulet’s book, Genoa functions at the juncture between two periods, the seventies and 2020, where stories of state violence have founded political experiences. There is at that intersection a manner of engaging another dialogue with the archive, operating cuts in history that enable the perception of a heritage without a testament, tragic repetitions, and perhaps also, horizons of hope.
Alice Leroy
Coordination : Alice Leroy
With Carlo Bachschmidt, Adila Bennedjaï-Zou, Maxime Boidy, Marie Fabre, Dario Marchiori
Session of Tuesday 23.08, 10:00: « Genoa, media, medium » avec Carlo Bachschmidt.
1. « Genova 2001 – Prises de vues », in Collectif Mauvaise Troupe, Constellations. Trajectoires révolutionnaires du jeune 21e siècle, Éditions de l’Éclat, 2014, p. 71.
2. Voir Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuremberg. La Bataille des images (Payot, 2021), et Dork Zabunyan, Fictions de Trump, puissances des images et exercices du pouvoir (Point du jour, 2020).
3. Mathieu Riboulet, Entre les deux il n’y a rien, Verdier, 2015, p. 15.
4. Ibidem, p. 11-12.
5. Michel Foucault, « Anti-Rétro », Cahiers du cinéma, n°251-252, juillet-août 1974, repris dans Dits et Écrits, II, 1970-1975, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 648.