Pojana’s older brothers: Edo the security guard, Tonon the rodent exterminator, Alvise the black man and others, saw the light the day after April 1, 2014. On that day, in fact, Italy discovered that in a warehouse in Casale di Scodosia (a municipality in the Venetian province known for its furniture factories and allegorical floats) a second Tanko was being built, an armored earthmoving machine, with a ‘small cannon’ in the turret.
My partner, the musician Giorgio Gobbo, and I immediately felt the need to tell the nation the stories of the northeast that no one outside the borders of the newly formed Padania knew. “The world must know – we thought – why the industrious Venetians build “techniques” worthy of ISIS in their warehouses emptied by the crisis”. It must be said that these stories were already being told by extraordinary journalists like Rumiz and Stella, or sociologists like Diamanti, but they were still barely present in the theater. There was a gap, we thought.
It is significant and terrible that the Venetians have become, today, the bad guys: tax evaders, racists, obtuse. Suddenly. From good provincials, hard workers, a bit of a mona, who out of poverty migrated to Rome to work as servants or carabinieri (cliché of many black and white films), to greedy bosses, just like that, suddenly, with ignorance acting as the common denominator of stereotypes.
An enigma, which for us is resolved in a story: we have gone from more or less Goldonian masks to a mirror of an entire society.
A promotion practically. When Francesco Imperato proposed that I collaborate on the project “This is Racism”, reciting the text by Marco Giacosa for the video of “Ciao Teroni” (there was a longer and more complex title, but virality reduced it to this), Franco Ford, known as “Pojana”, was already born. He was the rich little master of my adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” set in Veneto, with all his obsessions: guns, money and taxes, black people, the black. Later, the Propaganda Live band wanted him on their stage, and he revealed himself fully for what he is: a demon, small, not devoid of wisdom but not particularly high up in the infernal hierarchy, who uses the truth for his own ends and finds funny things that are not, and who is inside each of us. And here he is, with all his brothers, telling stories with a little truth and a little falsehood mixed in, to look at himself in the mirror.
