First of all, the trial. It ended with the 24 years conviction of Vitaly Markiv and the Ukraine government recognized responsible too. The verdict added 7 years more than what the Public Persecutor had requested and that created quite an uproar. Since, as we said many times already, this is not a private matter, but it is related to the right of being informed, we find very interesting the reasons of the verdict, that are expected to go public soon and that we hope are going to be even more relevant of the verdict itself. We commit therefore to report them in this blog as soon as they will be public.
In the last few months we committed ourselves in spreading among the people the awareness of the trial aiming to identify the responsibility for Andy’s killing. We tried to do that by organizing public meetings and events, that brought people that possibly till then were not even aware of what had happened, or had only heard superficially about it. Through the project “From barriers to bridges”, in collaboration with the Pavia Art School A. Volta, youngsters got to know about Andy’s work that has been brought to the Pavia center, through the jersey’s drawn by the students of the school. Now we are organizing together with the Art School a guided tour together with the authors of the graffiti: they will explain their work, the meaning they wanted to deliver via the images that they created and the relation of them with Andy’s work.
Another project we have in plan is the publishing of a book collecting the fables from the Senegalese tradition that were recorded, translated and collected many years ago in the village of Dabia by Andy and other friends that have been there many times during the years: the trips to Senegal as a youngster and especially the experiences in the small village of Dabia, had been key in Andy’s vocation for photography. The publishing of the material collected in Dabia would be the late realization of an old project in which Andy was involved and was particularly fond of.
These are just a few of the projects that we have in mind, and we are open to receive and take into consideration ideas, suggestions and proposals.
Finally, the most important thing: the Volpi Scapigliate are now an official no profit association… we will share soon information on how to join it, for whoever is interested to support the association.
For us, this is the beginning of a new year, taking on the projects and the values that urged us to create an association: protect and promote the press and information freedom as well as promote Andy’s work.