Small Steps Design. Il passaggio del pesce nello Stretto di Messina: dispositivi e strumenti di cattura

The passage of fish is a fundamental event in the life of Bagnara Calabra, a town of ten thousand inhabitants on the banks of the southern Tyrrhenian Sea. In its waters, located at the northern mouth of the Strait of Messina, large shoals of fish of different species move from the Tyrrhenian to the Ionian Sea and vice versa, in search of waters ideal for nourishment and reproduction. Fishing - in particular sword fishing - is the main activity in the area and has always taken place with the hunting of larger specimens or through devices, fixed or mobile, which intercept the flow of the smaller species, capturing them. In Bagnara Calabra, fishing characterizes the urban layout, architecture, craftsmanship, rites, and traditions. Fishing tackles and techniques in the Strait, described for the first time by Polybius in the second century BC, evolved very slowly until the 1960s, following procedures and rituals handed down from father to son. It is a design that has slowly refined itself, following a path with small steps. This paper aims to tell, through drawing, the design developed over time by the community of fishermen and craftsmen of Bagnara Calabra for the realization of their work tools. A design process that, through imperceptible formal and functional evolutions based on oral traditions and the emulation of pre-existing models, has been codified in forms, materials, ways of use. Equipment and devices that differ from those of the small neighbouring Calabrian (Scilla, Gioia Tauro) and Sicilian (Ganzirri, Faro) towns. It is a complex system composed of simple, essential elements, in which the choice of materials and their transformation has allowed the creation of objects without formalisms and extremely functional. At the same time, and in stark contrast to the pragmatism of tools and the organization of work, a huge intangible heritage has developed, connected to needs or events that really occurred in the past and which today are projected into an irrational, magical dimension. It is an attitude of ancestral respect and, at the same time, a challenge for that Nature which for the fishermen of Bagnara Calabra. Despite now using modern fishing tools and techniques, indeed, it remains a superior entity, impossible to dominate and with which it is necessary cohabiting in harmony.