Over 10 years in the making, Di Giugno’s Palermo I’ve by no means hated you is a prolific sequence that “responds to a need to acquire a social and environmental image of Palermo that for too many many years has suffered the results of a Mafia dimension rooted in its social and political material”. It’s an open-ended venture, a compendium, “to which I consistently add new photographs, exactly due to its anthological nature”, says Di Giugno.
Palermo I’ve by no means hated you is a seemingly disparate array of images that, stitched collectively, creates a portrait of Palermitani who refuse to be outlined by their hometown’s associations. The gathering is an ensemble by which every picture is integral to the entire. Di Giugno says his Palermitani are “united by a standard function”, deeply rooted in tradition and language, and decidedly territorial, as if saying with a hard and fast gaze and a full chest, ‘I’m the face of Palermo’. “They convey calmness and pleasure, which is the results of social and cultural redemption – a response triggered by the Mafia massacres which have permeated each facet of Sicilian society, from the 70s till in the present day.”
