MARESISTERE – State Archives of Naples

About every two years when I was younger, Uncle Peppino would come to see us from New York.

I recall sharing  stories, ragù, and friarielli at our meals together. He turned into an ice cream maker—the one with the van, the bright, friendly American food truck. He was quite proud of the walnut ice flavour that he had created. However, the beginning of the tale was always the same—boarding, crossing, arrival, and dream. I therefore thought of him, Uncle Peppino, every time I watched a movie on TV that was set in New York. Maresistere started out with these family tales. Other close relatives had moved away from Naples, and I would often listen to them tell the same stories over and over again, but with an ageing anguish in their voices. Their homes were always filled with black and white portraits in the bedrooms, lace tablecloths in the dining rooms, and Italian furniture throughout.Because I live in a seaside city, I frequently see the sea as a magnificent bridge where the other shore is waiting to save, or at least that is how it should be. With Maresistere, I wanted to retrace a grief that I have never personally experienced.This is not the tale of archive research, yet it was: New York and Naples converge at the 41st Parallel North. I began reading essays, watching documentaries, and visiting websites around 2016. I then made the decision to get in touch with the Banco di Napoli’s Historical Archives. The Banco advised me to visit the State Archives of Naples because the emigrants’ remittance receipts were insufficient for my needs. I began consulting the Questura’s General Archive in 2019. Passports and Emigration documents the infinite number of individuals who departed from the Port of Naples between 1880 and 1931. Therefore, I worked for five months in the study room of the Archives, surrounded by bundles and folders, to piece together the stories of 250 Neapolitans—men, women, and children—who had left their hometowns for  very distant places. I did this by cross-referencing the names on Ellis Island’s online databases and returning to paste unique stickers of the names of those who had left on the doors of Naples as it exists today.

I had never done any archival research before; it was really exciting but also thrilling to open tight folders with the strength of who wants to learn these stories. Sometimes I found paper as fragile as a 110-year-old grandmother and was afraid to touch the documents and turn them over. I was never as delicate as I was with those papers. A pungent and at the same time soothing smell has stayed with me, and it is something I only find again when I still go to the archives, among the lives I perceive to be  embraced all together on the shelves. A familiarity has remained with me inside, as if I had encountered those existences for real, and so every now and then I ideally pay them a visit.

Maresistere is my black and white project, I wanted to let the cards speak for themselves. I studied a lot, I read a lot: I discarded, I photographed, I exhumed. Among the papers I found poor souls, professionals, artists, children travelling alone, mothers and wives joining their men, showgirls and theatre companies.

So I gathered them all into one imagined space: them becoming the memory of themselves.

And so a bedroom was born, where everything and everyone seems to belong together in that one family called hope. The sea in the drawer is there kept among the linen, and it is not the dream in the drawer but rather the dream realised, and the sound of the sea is overlaid by the voices of actors Gianfranco Gallo and Fabiana Fazio. They recite a monologue, a cut and sew of Neapolitan song lyrics, put together without music like a patchwork of words locked in a cupboard. But all around in the room are the papers that become portraits without the narrow silence of a folder.

Roxy in the Box

Visit the first edition of MARESISTERE at the MANN – National Archaeological Museum of Naples.