Comizi d’Emigrazione
The Comizi d’Emigrazione zine is a collection of love letters that explores the interrelations between queer love, sentimentality and migration as an attempt to voice possible counter-narratives. Thus, when does love become a reason to leave? What does it mean to experience love far from home, to live intimacy in your second language? What are its implications one subjectivity and collectivity?
Starting with the love letters to Pier Paolo Pasolini, “not so dear” Silvio Berlusconi, and Mina by Alice Minervini, the zine includes contributions by Yasmin Ali Ahmed, Angel Dust, Ricardo Guimarães, Dani Lussi Martini, Colette Downing, Oh Imanuela, as well as illustrations by Ronni Winkler. The art direction and editing has been done by Alice Minervini, and the design by Agostino Quaranta.
Comizi d'Emigrazione Longing for Another Country or When Love Becomes a Reason to Leave by Alice Minervini
This publication is born from the urgency of investigating and simultaneously intervening on the interrelation of queer love, politics and migration as a response to Comizi d'Amore by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Pasolini’s Comizi d'Amore is a pioneering investigation of love and sexuality, the taboos around women's conditions and homophobia in Italy. Set in the 1963, before the so-called sexual revolution of ’68, the documentary provides a striking picture of the rigidity of social behaviours and the imposing catholic meta-narrative still present in Italy at that time and arguably today. In Comizi, the unapologetic voice of Pasolini, openly homosexual himself, longs for a pre-ideological vision of the world by opening up a debate on sex and culture, while providing a living testimony of sacred and profane love, as well as the Italian disappearing subcultures. However, the documentary in question accomplishes far beyond a simplistic sociological survey of sexual behaviour, taste or morals of the country; in fact it lets emerge a broader portrait of the repressed and repressive culture of the lower-middle-class of that time in Italy — in prominent contrast with the industrial boom of the 1960s. Thus, after more than 50 years from its conception, Comizi d'Amore still enacts an impossible conversation in space and across eras, between Italians of different regions, generations and beyond.
Seeing Comizi for the first time was a sudden epiphany. At first impression, I was shocked by how relatively recent yet how retrograde Italy appears in the documentary, and by how the logics appearing in it are still alive today. The inquiry of Pasolini continues to question and inform my “being Italian” and, for reasons I couldn't instantly unpack, my displacement.
Starting from personal experiences of migration, Comizi d'Emigrazione is an attempt to voice counter-narratives. Thus, the unapologetic testimony of Comizi d'Amore offers a methodological and conceptual framework to navigate the present condition of contemporary Italy and its realities beyond the nation. As well, to investigate who is “in the condition” of giving and receiving love, and why. By asking “When does Love Become a Reason to Leave?” this zine tries to establish a connection between the politics of loving and migration, connecting discourses that otherwise would not intertwine, personal experiences, poetry and academic research, in the attempt to let alternative narratives emerge. Even if I was not aware of it when I left, I left because I could not live my life as I wanted. But why? And what does this new wave of emigration say of Italy today? What does it mean to experience love far from home, to live intimacy in your second language? What implications does displacement have on subjectivity and collectivity?
Photograph by Emily Murayama
