Jacob Balzani Lööv is an Italian-Swedish photographer obsessed by stories of people intimately attached to a particular place, being it a contested territory or a tropical jungle. His approach is by foot: He believes that to connect to a place, you have to measure it by steps. Jacob’s home is between Milan and Monte Rosa, by the Italian Alps. He recently I discovered his father’s whereabouts in the highlands of Sweden: Härjedalen, where he started to feel a bit home too. Those became the starting points to explore his own personal connection with the landscape.
Jacob has a Master in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. Curious about the interconnections between humans and environment, he has PhD in Atmospheric Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a Master in Analysis of Environmental Systems from the University of Milano. Jacob is a member of the International Federation of Journalists (IJF-GB13053) and his works appear regularly in the major newspapers and magazines.
About /ustica/ – words by Jacob Balzani Lööv:
In the midst of the sea an island. Land of bleached bones and pirates. Black soil of volcano surrounded by abysses, challenged by courageous skin-divers. It is a small and fierce community of not even thousand souls, where everybody knows each other. Farmers, fishermen and who work for seasonal tourism. Islanders yes but not isolated, -it is the motto of their school but history, uncaring of how much water separates an island from the rest of the world, arrives here too sooner or later. It happened already with the prisons wanted by the House Bourbon, it happened during fascism, when political opponents like Bordiga and Gramsci, apostles of communism in Italy, were interned on the island. Until the 50s the word Ustica in the newspapers was used only besides escapes, riots and detainees pardoned by Mussolini. Later the island ceased to be a place of confinement and Ustica tried to polish its name for what it is: beautiful and wild black pearl in the Mediterranean Sea, gate to the mysterious underwater worlds. Every summer explorers and spokesmen of the Oceans, myths like Cousteau and Piccard, were meeting on the island to tell their adventures and findings. It didn’t last long.
Forty years ago, during one of those evenings of tales, just moments before the sun was setting down on the 27th of June 1980, history arrived here again. 115 kilometres away from the tiny emersion of the Tyrrhenian Sea, an airliner crashed in the water leaving no survivors. From that day Ustica ceased to be an island and became a massacre.
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 and 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. In the beginning of the 90s the municipality council even approved a motion to protest against the image damage the island received from the attribution of the massacre to Ustica. On the other hand talking with any other Italian, above all whoever grew up with the news that since almost half a century keeps recurring on TV about the massacre, Ustica evokes air crashes, state massacres and unsolvable mysteries. The word Ustica, from the beginning, was combined to the airplane crash because it is the nearest emerging land and maybe also because the journalists, assembled for the yearly International Show of Underwater Activities, dictated from here their first articles. 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, among the accident on Italian internal flights it would be enough to think about the tragedy of Montagna Longa (in which found his death Litterio Maggiore, a former major of Ustica) and the crash of Punta Rasi, both happened during landing at Palermo airport. Despite the large number of victims, many Italians do not remember those accidents. It is indeed easier to accept a tragic event with a clearly defined dynamic than an event in which a satisfying truth has never been found. It could be that the never-ending series of trials and news induced the stigmatisation of Ustica island. This phenomenon is linked to the social amplification of risk, which 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 receives phone calls from journalists asking if the Ustica airport is still working or 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 is 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 a 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.
39°43’00″N 12°55’00″E
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 a 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.
On the island of Ustica, 116 km away, nobody heard or saw anything. Only a phone call arrived, interrupting the yearly International Show of Underwater Activities: clearly shocked the organiser of the festival, doctor Lucio Messina, informed the public about the crash and asked the present authorities and militaries to go back in their offices to take further orders. The tiny island actually is the top of an enormous underwater volcano more than 3000 meters high and inactive for a hundred thousand years. The presence of many volcanoes, above or under water, attest how the Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the complex geology created when the Africa plate crashed into the Euroasiatic one. Ustica has been inhabited by pirates for centuries and according to some it was home for Circe the sorceress, famous for transforming her guests into swines. The ancient Romans were calling the island Ustica, from ustum meaning burnt, while Greeks were calling it Osteodes, ossuary because of the remaining of six thousands rebel mercenaries from the Carthage’s army, which died of hunger and above all of thirst after being abandoned as a reprisal. It was the scarcity of water that limited the development of the island until the invention of the water tanker and, more recently, the construction of a desalination plant. The island was mostly used as a pirates’ hideout until the House of Bourbon decided to repopulate it with farmers from the Aeolian islands. Every family was assigned a strip of land to farm but it was not easy to survive, the first newcomers were kidnapped by Saracen pirates and sold as slaves. In the second half of the 19th century many islanders preferred to emigrate to America and today in New Orleans live more than forty thousands descendants from Ustica who arrived to fill the reduced labour in the plantations after the abolishment of slavery.
On the highest peak of the island, Mount Guardia dei Turchi, a radar soars that young people enjoy calling it the monument to Tiger Woods. On the evening of the massacre that radar did not exist. The civilian radar only came into operation in the mid-1980s with the intention of keeping under control that area of the Tyrrhenian Sea that seemed to have been monitored by no one on the evening of the massacre.
In the massacre no inhabitant of Ustica died, the only islander to lose his life in a plane crash was the former mayor Dr. Litterio Maggiore when an airliner crashed on Montagnalonga on the night of May 5, 1972. Along with the Punta Raisi disaster, six years later, 223 people died near Palermo airport. According to many, the airport was built in an inappropriate place, according to some under pressure from the mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti.
The period, between the 60s and 70s, is still remembered as the golden age of Ustica. In 1959 there was the first International Show of Underwater Activities and two years later, under pressure from the population, confinement was abolished while the concurrent economic boom saw tourism growing and brought wealth to the islanders.
44°30’48″N 11°21’01″E
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 level 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.
In Ustica, on the evening of June 27, 1980, civil and military authorities were taken by helicopter back to Palermo to take care of the search and rescue operations. The Bannock, the italian oceanographic research vessel, also set sail, together with the patrol boats of the Port Authority and the Guardia di Finanza of Ustica, in search of any survivor. In fact, there was hope that the plane had made an emergency landing. By radio, the Bannock received instructions to go north while the expedition leader Professor Colantoni stayed on the bridge to monitor the rough waves in the dark of the night. After more than three hours of navigation, when it seemed that the ship was now close to the alleged crash site of the plane, an unexpected command came to make a further course to the west, towards Sardinia. It sounded very strange to Colantoni and later, in the testimony given to the judges, the suspicion will come that Bannock was deliberately removed from the place of events. Only in the morning arrived the order to sail back towards the abandoned route of the previous evening, the tail cone of the DC-9 was found first and then the heartbreaking show of the bodies presented itself. By now much better equipped rescue vehicles had arrived and the Bannock returned to Ustica. The final part of the festival was canceled due to mourning when the ship finally sailed from the island.