W H I T E B O X :: P R O G R A M

JOEL STERNFELD
TREADING ON KINGS - PROTESTING THE G8 AT GENOA

Four thousand journalists and photographers gathered in Genoa during the third week of July, 2001. They were there to cover the 26th meeting of the official discussion club of the leaders of the industrialized nations of the world— currently referred to as the G8. For the duration of the “summit”, few of those journalists ever ventured beyond the air-conditioned comfort of the Magazzini di Cotone, an immense cotton warehouse that had been temporarily converted into the world’s largest media and broadcast studio, set on a wharf extending into Genoa’s legendary harbor. There they dined on pasta generously provided by the Barilla company at “Pasta Pointe”, as they were simultaneously fed official briefings and press releases by the various delegations to the summit. Those journalists and photojournalists who did venture forth into the “red zone” and the “yellow zone”— sections of Genoa depopulated of residents and transformed into caged war zones by an occupying army of carabinieri and regular polizia —seemed to be defining events with a sports mentality. Would the protesters break into the “red zone?” That would be a victory; otherwise, there was no story. And for photojournalists the holy-grail was surely the decisive moment when the “black bloc” anarchists would start to throw Molotov cocktails, or even better, were properly beaten in the battle that might ensue.

None of these images seemed representative of the real concerns of the hundreds of thousands of peaceful, thoughtful demonstrators who came to Genoa with good intention and the utmost difficulty (since everything that made normal travel possible was officially shut down).

That this summit should be taking place in Genoa, city of Columbus’s origins, seemed symbolic, though perhaps ominous. Here again, in Genoa, some five hundred years later, we were on the verge of a new world—but whether that new world would embrace the tirelessly honed vision of the G8, based on the global application of supply-side economic principles biased in favor of big business, or the less understood, less precisely articulated, but more cross-generational, egalitarian and humanistic vision of the protesters, remains uncertain.

What did the banner-waving, song-singing, globally-wired “anti-global protesters” actually want? Sternfeld set out to find out. Walking and running the streets with the demonstrators, photographing and recording the comments of individuals as circumstances allowed, he made the series of quick portraits with accompanying statements that forms the heart of this exhibition.

As the week progressed, the level of violence increased. Unaccountable numbers of protesters and journalists were beaten and seriously injured. The death of Carlo Giuliani—a seminal event in the history of the anti-globalization movement— was followed by a sudden, simultaneous ringing of cell phones. And the terrifying Saturday night raid on the Genoa Social Forum, when sleeping protesters were beaten, leaving pools of blood on the floor of the Armando Diaz School, gave urgency to the task of reporting what had occurred.

Treading on Kings – Protesting the G8 in Genoa, with an introduction by Alexander Stille and special report by Stefanie Galante, an Italian PhD student arrested at the Genoa Social Forum, is to be published in June 2002 by Steidl.

Show: Treading on Kings – Protesting the G8 in Genoa
Publication: Village Voice
Writer: Vince Aletti
Title: Joel Sternfeld
Date: 3.12.02

The photographer turns from the American landscape to global politics with photos taken at the tumultuous G8 protests in Genoa last year, accompanied by texts condensed from interviews and participants.