… Let’s pretend that… everything’s OK, everything’s OK…
Let’s pretend that everything’s OK.
That the pauper’s really a great lord,
That the servant’s much better off than his master,
That old folk are doing very nicely,
That there are plenty of opportunities for young people.
Let’s pretend that… everything’s OK, everything’s OK…
Let’s pretend that everything’s OK…
These are the words of an Italian song by Ombretta Colli that was played at the start of “Onda Pazza” (“Crazy Wave”), the hilarious flagship show on Radio Aut, a self-financed radio station in Sicily. Every Friday evening, Peppino Impastato and his team would discuss the problems that afflicted their local area, presenting caricatural portrayals that verged on the absurd but were drastically close to home at the same time. They used the nicknames Mafiopolis and Mafiettopolis to refer to the local towns of Cinisi and Terrasini and made them into surreal settings for highly imaginative improvised satire that mocked and exposed social and political actions and behaviour in an area that was dominated and corrupted by the Mafia.
Peppino Impastato spent his short life in the places pictured here. This was where he was born and developed his own outlook, ideals and ethics, before his tragic, untimely death.
The photographs can be found in “La Voce di Impastato” (“Impastato’s Voice”), a book that was written by the journalist Ivan Vadori and published by Nuovadimensione.
2018
I luoghi di Impastato
