/ustica/

/ustica/

On June 27 1980, the same moment 81 passengers of an airplane ceased to exist, beside the meaning of the word Ustica, a toponym evoking a place, a beautiful black island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, another meaning emerged suddenly: the tragedy, the mistery, the massacre.

Forty years of trials and decoys made possible that when Italians think to Ustica the first thing that come up to their minds is the white and red wreckage of the DC9. Can an ugly thing pollute the meaning of a word? Can the ugly Italian politics ruin the landscape, not only physically, as it happens with illegal constructions but also culturally, ruining its image therefore its idea?

The first comment an inhabitant of Ustica would have about the airplane accident is that the island has nothing to do with it, the accident happened in the open sea, 115 kilometres away. In the beginning of the 90s the municipality council has even approved a motion to protest against the image damage the island received from the attribution of the massacre to Ustica. Narratives feed on places and to “materialise” in our mind they need to be associated to a physical reality. There are other accidents which are related to geographical toponyms but we tend to forget the ones with a clearly defined dynamic than the events for which a satisfying truth has never been found. It could be that the never-ending serie of trials and news induced the stigmatisation of Ustica island. This phenomenon is linked to the social amplification of risk, how is defined according to social and geography studies, meaning the role that media and public narratives have in amplifying perception and fear of places and causes of accidents or threats.

As the anniversary approaches, every year, the mayor of the island receive phone calls from journalists asking if the Ustica airport is still working of if some elder remembers the night of the accident. The flight was between Bologna and Palermo, in the little Ustica there has never been any airport and clearly nobody saw what happened more than hundred kilometres away. There are no direct links between the island and the massacre, on the island there are no memorials but if we search carefully, between the memories and the landscape of the island, a strong connection exists with the geopolitics of the Mediterranean Sea, which set the conditions that allowed the massacre, the decoys and the trials to become reality. Among those the deep relation with Libya: starting from 1911 almost thousand Libyan deportees were confined on the island. And the American influence: ustica for thirty years has been the island of Baseball, the sport introduced to Anzio shortly after the landing of the Allied troops in 1944.

Almost forty years went by and still there are no culprits for the massacre of Ustica: Unknowns. There is no expiration for a massacre offence and the judiciary is obliged to continue the investigation as new elements emerge. It is not clear who was responsible for the accident but how it happened was clarified after 19 years of inquiry. After five thousands pages of surveys the judge Priore concluded: the Itavia DC9 has been shot down during an episode of aerial warfare. No further details were given on it. The area is under NATO control but the presence of other military planes cannot be ruled out as a Libyan military jet and the body of its pilot were found few days later in southern Italy.

The idea of combining images of life on the island and landscapes linked to the tragedy, wants to give a cue to think about the link between those two antithetic meanings, about how this connection was suddenly formed and its consequences. After forty years from the massacre we want to remember and honour the 81 victims while rehabilitating Ustica in its original meaning of island.

© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
i

Point Condor. On June 27 1980 at 20:59 the DC9 I-TIGI sent its last transponder signal to the air traffic control based in Rome-Ciampino. Called by Palermo for the landing procedure, the airplane did not reply. The flight, after taking off from Bologna, disappeared together with 81 persons: 41 men, 25 women and 15 minors. It was a summer evening and many of the victims were going for holidays, few to Ustica for scuba diving. The airplane mostly sunk deep into the Tyrrhenian Sea, while the remains, the one still floating, were found in the following days scattered over thousand square kilometres. 42 bodies were never recovered. The earliest surveys and articles argued that the crash was provoked by a structural failure due to poor maintenance of the airplane. The airliner company Itavia, by the end of the year, had its concessions revoked and was obliged to file for bankruptcy.

© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
i

Poggio Ballone, Tuscany. The structure belongs to the 21st Radar Group of the Italian Air Force. The radar's task is to monitor airspace and check for intercepting aircraft within the scope of the national and NATO air defence network. On the afternoon of June 27, 1980, an alarm signal was issued several times by two F-104 fighters while they were near the DC9 I-TIGI. Neither the Air Force nor NATO have ever clarified the reasons for that alarm. That evening of June the DC9 was under the control of the Ciampino regional air traffic control center and under the surveillance of the military radars of Licola (near Naples) and Marsala (in Sicily). Furthermore, its passage was recorder by the radars of Poggio Ballone, Grosseto, Ciampino and Fiumicino, not to mention the possible presence on the scene of other NATO radars. According to the judge Priore ordinance each of these tracks has been tampered with or destroyed, the pages listing the military on duty carefully removed: “There was almost no possibility of reconstructing the before and after as the spatial surroundings of the event, essential for understanding the facts, because everything had been destroyed, or disappeared. Destructions and disappearances were not accidents - it is no longer possible to support it - but all happend in execution of a specific project to prevent any founded and reasonable reconstruction of the event, of the facts that had determined it and those that had followed. “

© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
i

Ravine of Magare. On the 18th of July 1980 in the town of Castelsilano in Calabria, a loud boom was heard coming from the nearby hills. Along the burning hillside of a ravine, the villagers found the remaining of a fighter jet, a Mig 23 under Libyan flag and the body of tis pilot. The official version, both of Italian and Libyan government, is the following: during a training on Libyan soil the pilot would have lost consciousness while the automatic pilot was on, it would have continued to fly until fuel was over to then crash in Calabria. This version was immediately contested and, according to some, the airplane crashed the same day of the Ustica massacre while the whole retrieval has ben colossally staged by militaries and secret services. It seems the body of the pilot was already in a state of advanced decay and it seems impossible that the airplane could have entered the Italian airspace while a large NATO exercise was taking place.

© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
i

Bologna, Museum for the Memory of Ustica. The lack of the aircraft and the black boxes did not allow much progress in the investigation of the Ustica massacre. The wreck was located in one of the most remote parts of the Tyrrhenian Sea, more than three thousand meters deep. In 1987 a first recovery campaign was entrusted to the French firm Ifremer which will then be accused of being linked to the secret services. The recovery was completed in 1991 in a second campaign with another company, Winpol, this time English. From the analysis of the black boxes it emerged that, until the moment of the disaster, the plane was in levelled flight and all the on-board systems were fully functional. The plane's fuselage was almost entirely rebuilt and was kept for fifteen years in a hangar at the military airport in Pratica di Mare. In 2006, at the request of the Relatives Association of the Victims of the Ustica Massacre, the remains were handed over to the Municipality of Bologna. Starting from the remains, the artist Christian Boltanski has developed an installation that has become the Museum for the Memory of Ustica. Over the years several trials have been carried out with regard to the massacre. At the end of August 1999, the Instructor Judge Rosario Priore deposited the ruling-order, declaring that he did not have to proceed because of the massacre because “the perpetrators of the crime were unknown but he brought to trial 3 generals and 5 Air Force officers for an attack against the constitutional bodies with an aggravating charge of high treason. The trial against them was definitively concluded in the Court of Cassation in January 2007, with an acquittal for lack of certain evidence. In September 2011 a sentence issued by the civil judge Paola Proto Pisani condemned the ministries of Defence and Transport to pay over € 100 million in favour of the families of the victims of the Ustica massacre. The two ministries were convicted of not having acted correctly in order to prevent the disaster, not guaranteeing that the sky of Ustica was controlled sufficiently by Italian, military and civilian radars and for subsequently impeding the ascertainment of the facts. After losing the appeal in November 2012, the sentence was definitively confirmed in the Court of Cassation. For the same reason, the Itavia company was also compensated. In the years between 2012 and 2019 other processes took place to guarantee the effective compensation of the victims.

© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project
© Jacob Balzani Lööv - Image from the /ustica/ photography project

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