With the myth of the good village we paraphrase that of the noble savage. The idea that originally small towns were livable, peaceful, supportive, genuine communities. In short, the village was good culture, good life and due to progress it has become a place of abandonment, of escape, of atavistic existence, of backwardness. So, many say, we need to repopulate them, give them back vitality: it’s not right for them to die. It is not useful to leave them to their fate. Here come houses for 1 euro, roots tourism, emotional tourism, the rediscovery of anthropological archetypes, rituals, good nutrition, and so on. All in the space of a week, a month, in summer or spring or whenever you want. Everyone enjoying the landscape, the women busy with the preserves, the old farmers with their stories, the people lining up for the procession. The musical band and the lights, the fireworks and finally the attractors and the mega attractors. The festivals of everything more. And then? In the heart of the village wind and photovoltaic systems. In the heart of the village there are extractive industries, cannons that stand out in the sky and spit smoke in the face of the sun and clouds. Queues of cars and vehicles lined up at the entrance to the village. Stressed people fleeing from the daily toil of places of “progress”. Everyone looking at that country as if it were an alien lost in modernity. A rare example of original extraneousness. Yet, the alien is that monstrous system of steel towers that insults the earth that hosts it. Foreign is that smoke that makes histories and cultures cough and become ill.
Small towns become the clearinghouse for the wear and tear of digital, work and performance life. They become the rest after the race towards insignificant and always unattainable goals. They become the last resort of senseless, predatory, ignorant, crude and uneducated tourism. Tourism, this magic word that solves everything, is nothing more than a way to accelerate the agony of the village. The town becomes a commercial product, a kiosk open to passing consumption.
And no one learns anything. No one learns to read those broken pavements, those half-open windows, those silent bells. Nobody learns that thousand-year-old language carved into the semantics of the roots. No one sees the resignation to loneliness in the faces of the old every day waiting for the end. No one understands the anger of fate on the tears of joy of those who return not to stay.
Today we must imagine the country as a place-actor in a Hamlet-like drama that represents the tragedy of being. An acentric place that questions meaning. A village that invites us to reflect on the model of society, on power, on being in relationship between and with the rest of the world. It invites us to reflect on the anguish of change, on the precariousness of existence, on the violent evacuation of values, on the diaspora of thought. Because the country is a gigantic place of knowledge, history, symbols, lives, still in movement. It’s not accordion, wine and sausage. Yet, it seems like a place condemned to experience the decline of the meanings that founded it. Thanks to fatuous tourism. This is what we have to learn.
We can also imagine a town as a village that lives, or rather survives, out of time, perhaps not out of time, but in an “other” time. And that’s it other time which stimulates us to search for new meanings of humanity. A future time that belongs to those who will live it, whose destiny we do not know. In the history of the village and of the lives that have passed through it and pass through it we can learn to connect the time of not anymore he was born in Not yet, and make uncertainty the raw material of doubt. And so you learn to value questions more than answers.
So? Let countries be places of culture, not of confetti and grilled meat. Above all, let them be places of production of theatre, music, cinema, literature, singing and philosophy. Let them be places of beauty and not of revelry. We need sensitivity, courage, creativity, which many young artists and creatives do not lack, and above all economic resources. Serious things aren’t done with pennies. Culture can contribute to curbing or slowing down depopulation more than talk about brain drain can.
Tags: Basilicata Depopulation myth good village
