Davide Enia's self-portrait: looking inside to understand the mafia
After the success of Italy - Brazil 3 to 2. The Return, with which he had celebrated to Spoleto his 20-year career in 2022, Davide Enia is expected with his new show Autoritratto, co-produced from CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Accademia Perduta Romagna Teatri and Festival dei Due Mondi under the patronage of the Falcone Foundation. Enia starts from "his" Palermo and the story of little Giuseppe di Matteo - the son of a kidnapped and murdered collaborator of justice from Cosa Nostra -, a story in which the Mafia mirrors family reality. A process of self-analysis guided by the intention of "not wanting to understand absolutely the mafia in itself, as much as trying to understand the mafia in me." As is always the case with his shows, the starting point is the study of reality, consulting archives and historical documents, questioning people who were close to the facts, looking at photographs,-with the collaboration of three retired former Antimafia officials, who help him to walk through the endless court pages-and finally digging into his own memory and experiences. Enia recounts, "In a cultural cradle in which "to megghiu parola è chìdda ca 'un si dice," the best word is the unspoken one, which is configured as the first threshold of omertà, to really confront Cosa Nostra is to begin a process of self-analysis. to Palermo all of us have very few degrees of separation with Cosa Nostra. The first murdered person I saw to eight years old, returning to home from school. I knew Judge Borsellino, he lived across the street from our house, I grew up playing to soccer with his son. And Father Pino Puglisi, the priest killed by the Mafia, was my high school religion teacher." Enia examines a particular case, a real watershed in the collective consciousness: the kidnapping and murder of Giuseppe di Matteo, the child son of a collaborator of justice, who was kidnapped, held for 778 days in captivity in appalling conditions and finally killed by strangulation and then dissolved in acid. An inhumane story that stands as the appearance of evil.
Enia continues, "In Sicily practically all of us had, at least until the massacres, a relationship of pure neurosis with Cosa Nostra. It is a discourse that has to do with shared collective consciousness, with the practice of everyday life, with millenary structures of thought. For various reasons, from we the Mafia has been minimized, underestimated, trivialized, removed or, on the contrary, mythologized. That is: it has never been addressed for what it is. And, to this blurring of the object from study, has been matched by an unconscious introjection of those identical modes of behavior, same practices, similar emotional outbursts."
Enia digs to deep into a reality in which the Mafia represents a mirror of family life, of decision-making and operational processes, of the way of observing the world and understanding relationships, of the relationship with religion. A "collective neurosis" from to face, eviscerate and finally come to terms with.