Palermo, the State Police and the Falcone Foundation share a cultural project which aims to achieve, with an innovative language, the increasingly active involvement of civil society on the issues of participation and the protection of legality.
The Falcone Foundation initiated and produced Spazi Capaci + Comunità Capaci, a special project of social design for memory, curated by Alessandro de Lisi, in view of the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Palermo mafia massacres.
The Falcone Foundation has always been committed to promoting the culture of legality and the memory of the fight against the mafia and over the years it has involved hundreds of thousands of students and a multitude of schools thanks to the constant relationship with the Ministry of Education.
Today, the State Police with the Palermo Police Headquarters joins the Falcone Foundation project by supporting and directly participating in the realization of an extraordinary urban installation intervention. The works of Velasco Vitali, protagonists of the Branco, will be placed inside the Police Headquarters, which has always been a place of anti-mafia memory and a symbol in the city of the many spontaneous demonstrations of the citizens that have followed, over the years, the capture of the many mafia bosses.
The works, which depict dogs, each named after an extinct city, are made with illegal building materials to represent the constant threat of criminal interests to the social environment and, at the same time, change meaning depending on where they live in relation to with the public. This moment is the start of a journey into the city, which began last 23st May in the Bunker Chamber, home of the historic maxi trial of Cosa Nostra, and then continued in other symbolic places of Palermo, institutions and historical natural places.
With this choice of the Palermo Police Headquarters, for the first time ever the Police participates directly in a contemporary art intervention, thus starting cultural activities towards the 30th anniversary of the massacres desired by the Falcone Foundation and in the process of being produced in various Italian cities , this participation will take place through a spectacular operation involving vehicles and dozens of agents, it will be a tribute to the city and a unique opportunity to create a special documentary of this performance for memory.
“This specific cultural project testifies, in the next thirty years of the massacres, to the indissoluble bond that exists between the City, civil society, the world of culture, the Judiciary and the State Police.” – explains Leopoldo Laricchia, Police Commissioner of Palermo – “The Palermo Police Headquarters becomes a place of excellence for an important innovative message which sees the Salita Manganelli offices identifying themselves not only as a symbolic container of the work of art but as an integral part of it”
“The Falcone Foundation has always been convinced” – says Maria Falcone, president of the Falcone Foundation – “that mafias can be defeated first and foremost with the affirmation of culture and art certainly represents a tool capable of achieving with the immediacy of its citizens' language. I find emblematic and very suggestive the idea that the Branco, which symbolizes the attack of crime on the State, passes from the bunker hall which instead embodies the victory of the State over Cosa Nostra, to the Palermo Police Headquarters, another symbolic place of the successes against crime and the heavy price of blood suffered by the Police in the fight against the clans. I want to particularly thank the Police Commissioner of Palermo Laricchia for wanting to be at our side, once again, in the work of raising awareness of the culture of legality".
“Art must be free to act, no conditioning must limit the language and political choices of artists, otherwise it is decoration, dangerous rhetoric, propaganda and when it underlines places and memories it takes that step of civil commitment which must transform cities, make of the suburbs new centers of dignity and revive the historical parts: the works can also strengthen the link between citizenship and institutions as in this case, unique so far, here in the Police Headquarters which is simultaneously a monument, a workplace, a shrine of memories" – concludes Alessandro de Lisi, General Curator of Spazi Capaci + Comunità Capaci of the Falcone Foundation.
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