Antonio Manfredi is a man desperate for attention. Last winter, with the woes of the financial crisis weighing heavily on Italy’s cultural sector, he sent an open letter to German chancellor Angela Merkel, in which he wrote that the cash-strapped museum he founded in southern Italy was in danger and in need of "cultural asylum." This past Sunday, he took things a step further: He and his staff burned a photocopy of a work of art in front of reporters, and announced plans to destroy one work from the permanent collection every day, beginning in mid-April, if funding for the museum did not improve.
For the past seven years, Manfredi has been director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Casoria (CAM) in his hometown outside of Naples. His stated hope has been that the museum, which he describes as a "garrison" for young and under-represented artists, might do something to reverse the sense of political and cultural isolation characteristic of life in southern Italy. It has been a lean operation from the start, but as that support from local government and private donations has begun to dry up given Italy's ongoing economic crisis, Manfredi has taken increasingly extreme measures to draw attention to his museum's plight. He hasn’t been shy about exploiting Naples’s characterization as a longtime home, victim, and enabler of organized crime to whip up support — though the veracity of his spectacular claims are up for debate.
Certainly, the influence of the mafia in the region isn't pure fabrication, and CAM has taken its share of heat becuase of it. In 2009, a lifesize effigy of an African figure was left impaled over the gates of the museum following an exhibition of art that dealt frankly with prostitution, a trade occupied locally almost entirely by African immigrants and controlled by the mafia. According to the Independent, security cameras have been stolen and the museum has faced attempted break-ins as well, occurences that Manfredi has blamed on the mafia.
Last year, he was invited by Vittorio Sgarbi, the curator of the Italian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, to install his work “May Be,” a series of portraits of fugutives with well-known ties to the Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta, criminal fellowships that predominate in the areas around Naples and Bari. By Manfredi's account, the reaction exhibitions like “May Be” has triggered a backlash that has put extra pressure on his museum's finances. He claims to have received phone calls from men using Camorra-style slang and making oblique threats. “It bothered them that I was exhibiting this kind of art,” he told ARTINFO, asserting that private sponsors have since been intimidated into rescinding their support. When asked which businesses had backed out, Manfredi was coy. “I have 10 businesses on the tip of my tongue, but if I gave you their names, then I might disappear.”
After a story about the art burning ran in the newspaper La Repubblica, ARTINFO decided to look into the extent to which CAM’s financial woes were the direct result of mafia involvement. Luisa Marro, who manages the cultural sector for the local government in Casoria, credits Manfredi for his efforts, saying that he has worked largely alone and has “never received anything special” from her administration. Prevailing attitudes in southern Italy, especially in a time of fiscal crisis, make fundraising for a young contemporary art museum particularly difficult. She nevertheless insisted that his references to organized crime in La Repubblica were largely metaphorical, reflecting the embattled nature of the museum. “When you change something, it has to be by force," she said. The cultural obstinancy of locals "is very 'Camorra' behavior. 'Camorra' is a way of thinking.”
Like Marro, Sgarbi was eager to credit Manfredi for his work, but was dismissive of suggestions that the museum’s problems had anything to do with organized crime. "It's useful to help demonstrate that we're dealing with something important, but I doubt that the Camorra is preoccupied with what Manfredi says about people who work for them, or the shows that he puts up," he said.
"In certain ways, CAM is a way of fighting back for Neapolitan artists," Sgarbi told ARTINFO, contrasting it with another institution, the Donna Regina, a more cosmopolitan contemporary art museum in Naples, which "involves itself with the real Mafia — the international art market." By and large, however, the challenges either museum faces are the same. "Italy is living in a time of crisis such that even the Donna Regina, and other public museums, are having serious difficulties. There isn’t a lot of interest in culture."