GLITTER BLUES (2011-2019)

In 2004 I went to Catania, thanks to an invitation from a friend who suggested that I visit the San Berillo neighbourhood during my walks around the city.

San Berillo is a small neighbourhood, as central as it is marginal, between Corso Sicilia and the Bellini Theatre. It has always been the red-light district (transvestites for the most part but also women, mostly South American), and in recent years African immigrants too, who often occupy the first floors of the old and unstable buildings.

The girls’ neighbourhood was set in the city in such a way that it seemed like a separate territory, like an island without the sea around it or a castle without fortifications.

After entering one of the alleyways of entry around the perimeter it feels like you are closed in, watched over and shielded. It’s like entering a private village that almost resembles an open-air home. In those four streets intimacy lives on the thresholds of the ground-floor single-rooms that open onto the street, and the invitation to be swallowed by it all is what defines the very nature of the place.

When I happened to be in Catania I was happy to roam that neighbourhood and to stop by the transvestites who felt like chatting between one client and the next. I spent time there but with discretion, trying to not be too much. The relationship was friendly but intermittent, superficial and light, as was normal for it to be. I got on with them but I had no intention of photographing them with a project in mind.

From 2011 I intensified my travels to Catania, because to my surprise, I also developed a passion for the celebrations of the Saint Agata festival — the patron saint of the city, who died a martyr after various tortures, culminating in the amputation of her breasts due to her refusal to give herself to the proconsul of the time without betraying the vows of her faith. Of the three days of the festival it is the night of the 5th of February above all that had a strong impact on me: an enormous throng of devout believers, especially young people, take charge of enormous votive candles and follow the simulacrum of the martyr, who is carried in the procession around the city. The request for grace, or the thanks for the grace received, imply blind faith in the miraculous, and for this the devout believers seek to make themselves worthy through the penance of transporting their own heavy candle and attending to its flame. The images of devotion and earnestness not of the time of these young people, who pass through the night with their own flames, instil wonder in me, and every time it enchants and hypnotises me. The pagan spirit of this loud exhibition of abandon to the mysterious, combined with the image of the humiliated young girl, tortured and amputated in her most symbolic physical expression of femininity, created in me a powerful emotional short-circuit that made me associate the virgin to the girls, to whom nature had not granted breasts but excess genitals, which had caused, in spite of themselves, a conflicting personal identity and too often had left them as objects of bigoted discrimination.

In 2014 I met Lulù and my involvement took root and grew. Lulù is a reserved person of few words and her femininity is evident and irrefutable. She is a woman born in the body of a man. This is so obvious that she has never felt the need to use hormones nor has she ever thought of the possibility of having an operation to change sex. Not that this defines a judgement of merit but it is a given fact that her femininity was so natural that even her family accepted her with ease, so much so that her own father reassured her, telling her that it wasn’t her fault if she was born in the body of a man, and called her my little girl, an openness of unusual horizons in the south of Italy in the 60s and 70s.

Unfortunately there weren’t many of the girls that I met in San Berillo who were accepted for who they are by their original families, rather their stories were often of violence and repression of identity. Dramatic domestic battles that led to painful exiles, but that in certain cases — especially recently — had a happy ending or at least a reconciliation, at the end of a long journey of denial.

One day I’m aimlessly walking far away from the neighbourhood and I hear my name being called. I turn around and I see this guy who is trying to catch my eye even though I don’t recognise him. Certainly his face was familiar but I couldn’t manage to associate it with a person. He says to me: “Ciao Lorenzo, it’s Marcello…” but I continue to not put two and two together until he says to me: “Don’t you recognise me? It’s me, Lulù, Lulù from San Berillo.” But of course, Lulù. After a pause he continues: “But when I’m not there I want people to use my Christian name and that’s Marcello.” As soon as I made the connection it was all too evident that Lulù was Marcello and vice-versa: this out-of-place encounter was an epiphany that unveiled to me something apparently obvious but which I had never really considered until that moment. The discovery of Marcello and Lulù signalled the true beginning of this story, it was the common thread that enabled the untangling of the knot. Before, I kept the two realities separate; it seemed the girls could exist only in the neighbourhood (and in fact for some of them this is the case, they live and work there and leave only seldomly). Through their presence and their daily transformation the crumbling neighbourhood and the girls’ love dens become invented kingdoms where their identities bloom. A world apart, no less real than the other.

I imagined these caterpillars moving around the city from one extreme to another, their converging from the outskirts towards the centre, mixing themselves into the chaos of a diverse humanity in which everything seems indistinct, until they arrive on the threshold of a small damp room of only a few square metres where, as soon as they enter, the transformation occurs and the caterpillars become colourful-winged butterflies. All of this had made the veil fall and my imagination fly. I saw their story in a new way. My uncertain intention became clear.

From 2015 to 2019 I spent long periods in Catania with obsessive regularity: four times a year, once a season. Our time together became habit. I met Franchina, Cioccolatina, Lulù, Ramona, Brigida, Ornella, Monica, Fiorella, Rosa, Ambra, Graziella and some others. They are all Sicilians and all transvestites - apart from Rosa, a biological woman integrated into the group. When I’m there I spend my days with them full-time. I try to be invisible because my presence could inhibit the clients and disturb the girls who need to work, so I move from one room to the next — repeating my round many times — seeking to fill their empty moments. The photographs are of the intervals that punctuate this repetitive daily humdrum and our sessions are never too long because the girls are temperamental and unpredictable, and if they give themselves to me it’s because they really feel like it. In this way we kept each other company and got to know each other over the course of time.

At the time of writing it has been two years since I stopped going to Catania. With the girls I have celebrated birthdays, farewells and homecomings, we have been to the bar, out to dinner, for walks, to bingo, to do the shopping, to church, to the police station and even to the cemetery. With some of them a friendship was born, with others a congeniality and with others still we stopped at only an acquaintance.

Franchina continues to be an essential voice in the neighbourhood. She has no more desire to be a sex worker. Every evening she returns to Acitrezza but the following day she is always on her threshold. She has written two books that recount lives, reflections and stories of her experience there. She is wedded to San Berillo. Through the years she has moved closer to mysticism and she goes to church with assiduity. She does volunteer work and she is a well known figure in the community. There aren’t too many photos of her in the book because she doesn’t love to be photographed but there is a written piece by her that says very much.

Cioccolatina is always her usual exuberant self with her head screwed on right. She lives in Nesima with her beloved Pomeranian Chicco and by now without her sister Maria, with whom she used to live in symbiosis, and who not long ago passed away. It’s been months since she went to the neighbourhood but she is a practical person and well-liked, she loves her routine and making others feel good. She always finds a way…

Lulù lives in her own world. She passes long days in her big house in Librino taking care of her animals; her twin sister Beatrice hangs out with her and every week she visits her parents and Luigi — the love of her life — in the cemetery. Then when she feels like it she allows herself some lovers, whether it’s at home or in San Berillo.

From those three I knew that Ramona, after various vicissitudes, returned to her village (but who knows how long that will last) and Brigida did the same but luckily in a more peaceful way than Ramona, and for now she isn’t really thinking about returning to and living in San Berillo. Instead Ornella passes every now and then to say hello, but for a while now, she has organised her life in a different way and far from there. Monica the Viking is always at her intersection navigating complicated situations of every kind, while Fiorella, unfortunately died recently in tragic circumstances. Rosa continues to share Franchina’s room, who has always protected and supported her as if she were a sister. Ambra for some years has worked the morning instead of the evening and for the rest of the time she lives with her partner and lives the good life. Graziella, with whom I share the same birthday, continues to work the evenings, and she isn’t scared of a thing.

This story is not only poetic. It’s also a story of suffering for a rejected identity. Often it is also a story of misery. There’s the need to sell oneself as the only possibility for existing. There’s the impossibility of, or the incapacity for, creating around yourself some steady relationships and a normal life in the simplest sense of the word. There exists a sense of guilt that fights with the desire for redemption. The context is a land where the catholic tradition lives in close contact with the criminal one, and where religion, devotion, sin, sexuality and violence are weaved together by a magical force that synthesises them all. But theirs is also an extreme choice of liberty and of affirmation of their own beings, with all the risks and the limits that this brings in a falsely open society like ours. There is also the strong sense of belonging to a community, with all the tensions that living in such a society on the margins implies. However the girls do not have owners and for many of them sex is or was also pleasure, possibility, travel and adventure. In life they got by but they also lived it and when they managed to, they enjoyed it to the core. They live to be accepted for who they are, to have the liberty to be themselves with all the contradictions that this brings. My transparent sense of identity made me feel at home around them. My need to give and receive selfless warmth was satisfied and reciprocated by their company and by their faith, and I hope that this book can give something back, a testimony filled with real life.

The virus has certainly contributed to speeding up the process of disintegration of the neighbourhood and of the community that I got to know, but that’s the way things go. I hope I’m wrong. They say that weeds are the hardest to uproot and perhaps it’s really so. San Berillo is a neighbourhood that’s very coveted for investment and property speculations that look appetitising to many. Even if for years it has resisted modernisation and change, its unstable buildings and the strategic position of this intersection in the heart of the city makes you think that this world apart won’t last too long. However that which existed has existed and these pages will keep alive the memory, whatever tomorrow will be.

Text by Lorenzo Castore