With Palermo 90 the photographer Fabio Sgroi continues the story of a city that has always lived in the shadow of the news, despite cultivating avant-garde and experimental ferments within it.
If in the previous volume Palermo 84/86, early works Sgroi is a punk who personally experiences the Palermo underground, in the nineties he becomes above all a spectator who observes what happens around him. Politics plays a leading role even among young people, just think that the student movement of the Panther was born at the University of Palermo at the end of 1989. Alongside punk, hip hop, street art and tattoos arrive. We are also together in a more organized way, to propose a cultural and political alternative; the occupations begin and concerts of the Italian alternative scene and arthouse cinema reviews are organized. “Something that just a few years earlier, when I was twenty, was unthinkable,” says Sgroi.
Palermo 90 (Union editions) tells of a place full of energy, influences and cross-cutting ideas, but which remain marginal in the national panorama because they are also the years of the maxi-trial, of tangentopoli and of the mafia massacres in which Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino die. “A feared city, but not respected, rejected because it is different and hidden”, writes Rodan Di Maria in the introduction of the book, adding that “it is not easy in words to describe that drift, that search for something I don’t know what, that restless agitation in the belly of what seemed to us a carcass but was instead a very alive beast, but close to being killed ”.
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