Text by Alessia Baranello
All images © Agnese Barbarani
Agnese Barbarani (1995, Verona) is an Italian photographer specialising in documentary and portrait photography. Her work embraces visual journalism offering an account of global inequalities, social and ecological violence and the power structures that maintain them. She spent months in Costa Rica documenting the advancement of American capitalism among the indigenous Ndoge tribe. In 2023, she denounced the exodus from Nagorno Karabakh by the Azerbaijani government in Armenia. She also started documenting the disarmament struggle of the ‘CALP’ – Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali of Genoa with the photographic series Objects of Resistance (2024).
“In both cases, war was the engine of growth. Genoa became, thanks to Ansaldo, the city of cannons and battleships” (Antonio Gibelli, 1999)
Most of our Italian readers have probably heard of CALP in connection to the sabotage of some ships belonging to the Saudi Arabian company Bahri, which were supplying weapons for the destruction of Gaza and now Lebanon. However, CALP – Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali – has been fighting since before it was called CALP, starting in the 1970s when the dockers of Genoa launched a ten-day blockade of arms destined for the United States during the Vietnam War. Over the years, the collective has been a major topic in the Italian news, ostracized by right-wing politicians like Matteo Salvini, praised by international liberation movements around the world, and even considered dangerous by the dockers of Genoa themselves. For her latest body of work, Objects of Resistance (2024), photographer and photojournalist Agnese Barbarani spent an entire month in Genoa, alongside the members of the collective.
The protagonists of the photographic series are crowbars, suspensions, communist books, bolts and screws – all photographed in a black and white studio style. Barbarani took the time to listen to the dockers’ stories and tried to visualise the sabotages that had taken place before 2019, when the port of Genoa hadn’t yet been eaten up by multinational and political interests. As Barbarani says, it was a question of telling a story that she hadn’t experienced first-hand and that wouldn’t happen again any time soon.
She asked to visit the dockyard workshop and, on the spot, picked out the objects that came closest to her idea of sabotage. Some objects were probably used to stop shipments, others, like the spring, have more abstract overtones linked to the ideals of the collective. But the important takeaway from this choice is that these objects of resistance and struggle are actually the same ones that the dockers use in their everyday work. Barbarani imbues work equipment with a sense of monumentality, as if they were ancient ruins or architectural wonders in a remote location. They evoke a sense of decadence and mortality, reminiscent of the distorted face of Marilyn Monroe in a Warhol print – decaying icons of popular culture. Against the white background, the dockers’ tools stand out as they are – oily, marred and dusty. But there’s more to the choice of this photographic style, and it has to do with the subterranean history of the port itself.
When it came to formalising her photography of these objects of resistance, Barbarani drew inspiration from an unexpected source: the archives of the Ansaldo Foundation. Ansaldo was an armaments company based in Genoa, now owned by Leonardo S.p.A., and is the proud owner of this physical and digitised archive of images of war production between the two world wars. Recently, the former company has been working on cataloguing and digitizing images of tools used in the production of weapons. Photographed on a white background with black contrast, they look very similar to the Objects of Resistance captured by Barbarani. “When I saw the photos of the Ansaldo Foundation”, says Barbarani, “I thought I’d try to capture the same style to show the tools of struggle, sabotage and resistance used by the CALP on a par with the propaganda photos of the Italian war industry”.
The instruments that started and continue to fuel wars are placed here in a completely different context and with a completely different purpose, testifying that the port of Genoa, alongside the cannons and battleships, maintains a counter-narrative.
The dockers of Genoa and CALP are two separate things that only sometimes overlap. Not all CALP members work in the port and, conversely, not all dockers agree with or want to be associated with CALP’s actions. But although the history of CALP is very different from that of the port of Genoa, the port itself has historically struggled against war and injustice, and Barbarani’s work manages to capture this larger picture as well.
In 1340 Genoa was the first city to have an association of dockers – the Compagnia dei Caravana – and in Genoa was always signed one of the first general labor regulations in Europe. And, as the workers often point out, the port of Genoa still has no political or municipal representation: it is the dockers who really run the port, the heart of the city – not the police, not the multinationals, not the politicians. “Most of the dockers inherited their jobs from their parents, and they do have good salaries. One thing that struck me the first few times I drove past the port was seeing dockers driving Teslas”
Despite the fact that their financial circumstances do not require them to, the dockers of Genoa nevertheless carry on the ideals of the working class: “they will never let themselves be intimidated by the attitude of the politicians or the police who want to stick their noses into their business. Even if a lot is changing – with multinationals increasingly taking over the port – there will always be a network of historical resistance on the side of Genoa that will be difficult to break”.
Even seemingly simple things, like a spring, can ignite a majestic revolution and the story of the port of Genoa and its dockworkers is a great example of this. Their secular resistance is not about making a fuss, but about consistently and continuously saying no to what’s wrong. “It may seem a little unusual to see a political struggle told through photographs that don’t directly show protests or sabotage”, continues Barbarani, “but there’s a reason for this absence of sensationalism. I think these objects have the same impact, if not more, of a picture of workers smashing a net during a protest”.
