Migrants move, leaving behind their familiar habitat and facing the task of finding a new one. For migrants, a new home can be a place of precarious safety, a habitat fraught with insecurity. This is what Alberto Gandolfo gives photographic form to in “Habitat”.
Sean Sheehan
Between 1900 and 1930, over 15 million Italians left their country to find a better life overseas. Many went to the USA, helping make the vast majority of Americans the descendants of migrants.
This does not prevent many Americans, regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity, being intolerant of migrants.
Nor does it stop many Italians feeling hostile towards people from North and sub-Saharan Africa who come to their land for the same kind of reasons that once drove members of their families to the USA and elsewhere.
As Cecilia Farrara says in Alberto Gandolfo’s “Habitat” migration has become a tool for propaganda by political parties. She is referring to Italy but the same could be said of the UK and the USA: ‘the narrative of the bad immigrant has come to dominate, while foreign workers have entered en masse into the labour market of the poor and unskilled that holds up half of the Italian economy.’
Substantial international aid to countries steeped in poverty would reduce the number of migrants but this is not happening at a governmental level.
In Italy, it is the 5 million foreign workers who help by remitting 8 billion euro every year to families left behind. They don’t come to Italy to admire its classical heritage.
Gandolfo’s photographs are more than documentary evidence of migrants’ material deprivation as they struggle to live and save money to send home. His images express dignity and self-respect but also a new form of slavery in the heart of cultured Europe. It is what allows vegetables to arrive on supermarket shelves without costing what they should if everyone helping to produce them received the wages they deserve.
Most migrants will have residence permits or documentation relating to asylum claims and Gandolfo visits their shantytowns in the countryside. They are built on the edges of Italian cities and their inhabitants survive by finding employment at harvest time when large farms want cheap labour.
They endure and patiently make the best of their circumstances, constructing their homes using materials that cost the least – sheets of plastic and wood – and rebuilding them when they are dismantled by local authorities. A lot of the work does not involve contracts and there are estimated to be more than 400,000 agricultural workers in Italy – foreigners making up 80% of them – receiving between 20 and 30 euro for twelve hours’ work.
Born in Sicily in 1983, Gandolfo spent two years travelling and meeting migrants in southern Italy and ‘Habitat’ is his second book.
Alberto Gandolfo’s “Habitat” is published by Kehrer
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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