L'ALTRA AMERICA di Sandro Mele

About

The Other America was born from the deep friendship between the artist and the civil rights activist, Bettie Petith (Virginia, 1935).  The project has as its fulcrum a list, requested by the artist and drafted by Bettie during the lockdown. It includes the names of African Americans whose work changed the history of America. In the course of suspended time, difficult but loaded with substantial moments of reflection, Sandro Mele has translated these memories into portraits; cutting, magnificently intense, monumental in their chromatism and in the compelling presence  of their gaze.

With a pure eye, sensitive and attentive, Sandro Mele mends the pieces of a forgotten story, unknown to many, making use of real experiences and precious direct testimonies..  Lucid chronicler of his time and of the most contingent
political and social dynamics, Mele  traces the furrows of a past epoch, threatened with oblivion, contextualising it in a new and incisive story.

This unknown America, potent, throbbing and revolutionary, weaves itself into the contemporary ethical drift, to a present  studded with horrible crimes which remind us even today how determined action is auspicable and necessary.

The heroic actions of Huey Newton, Martin Luther King, Rosa Louise Parks, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson and Franz Fanon  can be superimposed on the many crimes which still today crowd the daily news stories.  From the miscarriage of justice for the young George Stinney Jr. condemned in 1944 and declared innocent only in 2014 to the tragic death of George Floyd (Minnesota, 25 May, 2020).

Co-founder of Associazione Fitil Onlus and protagonist of a video interview by Sandro Mele, Bettie Petith carries with her the baggage of an inestimable life.
Co-responsable of the employment department of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality, she met revolutionary leaders such a Malcolm X and Saul Alinsky and followed the activities of the Freedom Riders and the Black Panthers. By both historic recognitions and by direct confrontations with her contemporaries, Bettie had the opportunity  to understand how deeply racist thinking was rooted in the culture of her country and dedicated part of her life to the ransom and the civic affirmation of the African population in America and in the world.  Today, through her association, she sponsors hundreds of development projects in Burkina Faso, a state recently devastated by internal conflict, jihad incursions, uncontrollable vigilantes and by a government which is weak and dangerously corrupt.

Bettie's social militancy is superimposed  by that of Sandro Mele, always constant.  His work, conceived of as the instrument of a message to disseminate, denouncing the prevarications and the injustices which settle in the folds of daily life, highlighting distortions, blind spots and economic-political degeneration.

Luisa Montaperto