Calle Tredici Martiri (Alley of the Thirteen Martyrs)

Toby Upson reviews 'Calle Tredici Martiri' (Alley of the Thirteen Martyrs) a new book by Jason Koxvold & Aldo Varisco recounting the Italian partisan struggles of the mid 1940s and finds in the faded jottings and dusty photographs an important message for those wishing to tell truth to power today.

Paper backed and bound without a spine. The schizophrenic Calle Tredici Martiri pairs faded jottings, like those found on the back of an encoded postcard, with dusty photographs.

Described as a ‘fictionalised photographic reinterpretation’ Calle Tredici Martiri (Alley of the Thirteen Martyrs) brings together diary entries, archival and contemporary photographs, to narrate a poignant history of human struggle against regimes of narcissistic political power. 

Taking his grandfather’s daily jottings from the mid-1940s as a point of reference, Calle Tredici Martiri is the result of Jason Koxvold’s wider research into the partisan resistance, in northern Italy. Labelled as a bandit Koxvold’s grandfather, Aldo Varisco, was an instrumental figure who co-ordinated an array of direct action with the intention of disrupting the power held by the German National Republican Guard, and the Italian Fascists alike. Collected here, the translated fragments abstracted directly from Varisco’s diary’s take us on a torturous tour through grassroots resistance meetings, militant campaigns, and the deadly repercussions of being caught. 

In keeping with the unstable times of 1940s Italy (we think we have it hard…) Varisco’s memoirs unfurl with an explosive speed: names of co-conspirators, roles, dates, locations, planned movements and campaign results are recorded with minimal subjectivity. This lack of the fleshy human voice calls to mind the limits placed on personal liberty by those holding power.

As a continuation of his grandfather’s spirit, Koxvold strategically divides the 79 pages of text with archival photographs and postcards. These nostalgic interventions haunt the text; providing a visual ambiguity which clashes with the directness of each diary record. The juxtaposition between the text and the whimsical archival photographs, alludes to the fragility of memory and indeed of history. ‘History is always told by the victor,’ an old cliché but I am going to roll it out here as it highlights precisely the issue at hand; that is, who gets to speak, who gets remembered, and who ultimately shapes our reality. 

The fog-grey chapter that holds Varisco’s history is enveloped with page after page of spectral photography. Pairing idyllic shots of early morning Venice with sterner photographs of modern architecture and political meeting spaces, Koxvold shifts the means of communication from the objective recounting of history, through text, to a more ambiguous narration, via the camera. In doing so he exacerbates the idea of controlled history and the erasure of narratives. Koxvold’s snapshots capture an emancipated Venice in a state of stasis, the jade green waters and skin toned architecture slowly fade like a negative left in the sun, whilst bureaucratic buildings are captured in sharp black and white clarity. 

Memory is always a hazy ideal without the regimes of history making it concrete. Throughout the book Koxvold not only provides a space to celebrate the achievements of his grandfather, but questions the power dynamics which are still being wielded today by men in economic/political power, to clinically remove the messy mass of humanity from its (poisonous) ideal society.

Toby Upson

Jason Koxvold & Aldo Varisco
Calle Tredici Martiri 

(2019, Gnomic Book)