In Naples there is only one legal gipsy camp, located behind the Secondigliano prison.
When I saw this camp it appeared to me a scenery oneiric and real at the same time. This was the world of Vesna, a deaf-mute little girl: the microcosm of her family was full of childish games inside d privations and discomforts but also of socialization times. The main subjects that at racted my attention were children with whom my interaction was particularly easy.
Through the photography I got involved into the dreamy world of Vesna and her five brothers. My experience was based on the empathy and on the sharing of the subjective lived background. The Roma people constitute, as a whole, an extremely vulnerable group of inhabitants in our countries. They are still rejected, after centuries of discrimination and slavery, with brutal effort.
Gypsies are also coalesced because they live in precarious situations almost everywhere inside the European Union, then their existence is relegated to the borders of cities and emarginated by society.
The individuals are fragile, their lives are spent in a sense of disorientation and often passive resignation.The image of Romanies is basically the result of medieval generalizations; an irrational intolerance is jo ned with a superficial information distorted by prejudice and stereotypes:
often this information is artfullybuilt by populist governments (like currently in France or Italy) intenton creating social confusion about the “public enemy”, again stigmatizing gypsies. Rarely people in Rome are considered in their cultural peculiarities and their complexity:they let me think to a sort
of magic caleidoscope where dance and tears swim together in a musical sea of life.
Born 1969 in Washington D.C, Maurizio graduated in Italy from Federico II University in political science. He’s Photo Lab Technician and research assistant at University of Naples Audiovisual Research Center (Faculty of Sociology). Main research subjects are ROM’s identity, urban daily life, street photography, live music, theatre, performing arts.
