Translator: Chiara Polesinanti Reviewer: John Ockey
If I asked you what 'Home' means to you,
I'm sure I'd hear very different answers.
For me, for example, home is a nice place by the sea.
For my mother, for example, it would be a place in town.
Something I couldn't even fathom.
But this makes me realise that the concept of home is very relative.
When my friends at TEDx asked me to talk about home
I went to Wikipedia and looked up the word 'Home'.
It says, “A home is any structure that will shelter us from the elements."
So I thought, "What if I asked my dolphin friends?"
Surely, they don't have to take shelter from the elements.
So, I realised that this is an even more relative concept.
What if I asked Neil Armstrong, when he was on the moon?
What was a home for him at that time?
He would have pointed to a blue dot.
The Earth.
Our home is our planet Earth.
And looking at it from up there, Neil Armstrong saw it
just like a blue dot,
since 70% of it is made up of water, or rather it's covered in water.
What have we done to guard this very important home?
Very little.
Our beaches speak very clearly,
we see that there is a lot of plastic, a lot of pollution.
A bit like when we have guests at home,
we don't take them to see --
if I took them to see my room,
I'm sure they'd throw their hands in the air.
But also with fishing, which is very often unregulated, illegal,
we do very serious damage to our home.
It was a small, big sperm whale that helped me understand this in 2017.
That sperm whale was caught in an illegal drift net
off the Aeolian Islands.
The Coast Guard tried to free it.
Unfortunately, they failed.
The sperm whale swam away.
Everyone on social media hoped
that the sperm whale could return to live peacefully and freely in his sea.
Unfortunately, the next day we found that the sperm whale had drifted,
with the current, to Capo Milazzo, and he was dead.
So I immediately decided to go and check out this huge sperm whale.
The first contact I had with him was --
you can imagine, he was below, by the rocks--
was through my nose.
From a distance, I could smell the foul odour
of the rotting sperm whale,
you can see it in the photo.
As I approached, the smell kept getting stronger
and this huge mass of rotting, dead flesh appeared before my eyes.
But looking him in the eye,
something was telling me that the sperm whale wasn't really dead.
I felt he was somehow alive, he was speaking to me,
he was asking for help,
he was asking me to not let him die again,
but to bring him back to life somehow, talking about how he had died,
in order to prevent other sperm whales, his brothers in the sea,
from dying just like he had.
So I thought that we had to give this sperm whale a new home,
this time a much safer one,
that could communicate something to everybody.
I didn't --
finally with a strong stomach
I dived into that water.
Usually, strandings take place on the beach.
So you have all the ease of opening the belly,
de-fleshing its skeleton, while being dressed.
In that case, the sperm whale was immersed in water,
there was no means to move it out of the water.
So I had to go into the water wearing a wetsuit
in order to gather the bones.
And believe me, it wasn't exactly fragrant.
It wasn't Chanel No.5.
If you don't believe it, you may still smell it on me.
But, when I opened the sperm whale's belly,
I found a lot of plastic inside.
Even a garden pot.
He had chewed the pot, literally, and swallowed it.
With great effort and a strong stomach,
in just 15 days, I stripped all the flesh from the sperm whale,
I took all the bones ashore,
with the strong determination of creating this museum of the sea,
that did not exist in Milazzo.
Just to give a voice to the sperm whale Siso.
Unfortunately, the day after this recovery,
a dear friend of mine, Francesco,
who had helped me bring the bones ashore,
had a terrible accident on his scooter.
A tragedy within the tragedy.
Francesco lost his life in this terrible accident
and those two intertwining destinies
led me to name the sperm whale,
to baptise him, with Francesco's name,
or better with his nickname,
with which I usually called him affectionately: Siso.
From that day he became Siso the Sperm Whale.
Just the other day, a child at school said to me,
"But who told you his name was Siso the Sperm Whale?"
And I actually told him this story.
So the sperm whale got to land,
his bones were incredibly rich in fat.
The real work was about to begin.
It was a very difficult feat,
since I decided not to use chemicals,
but only hot water and hydrogen peroxyide,
precisely to prevent the bones of the sperm whale Siso
from becoming polluted with the same chemicals
that kill many marine animals.
So, for a year I was in contact with this large amount of fat.
This had very negative consequences, but also some positive ones,
I no longer need to use hand products,
I always have smooth hands!
Up to that point I did it all by myself,
but the moment arrived
to make public what had happened.
I needed many people to aid me in achieving the goal,
to respond to that cry for aid from the sperm whale Siso.
And so, I launched the "Siso Project" on social media.
And aid came in from all over the world.
Many people, professionals, artists,
common people, participated in my crowdfunding
donating even just five, ten euro,
and they made it possible
to reach the incredible figure of 30,000 euro,
to make the dream come true.
This is the Siso Project logo,
that was donated by a girl,
who didn't know me; she got in touch with me on social media
and said, "Look, I made this logo, do you like it?"
I said, "That's great!"
This gives the idea of what happened.
Many people who didn't know me, who didn't know the sperm whale Siso,
were endowed with what I call the "Siso Power",
this positive energy,
that made it possible to build the museum.
Thus, a drift net that killed the sperm whale,
an illegal drift net that killed the sperm whale,
therefore an evil net,
now becomes a good net, the human positive network,
the human network that unites and brings back to life a sperm whale
that died, precisely, because of human action.
Here is the Siso Project logo,
with all the names of the people who contributed to this project
and it will stand inside the museum forever.
That's over 1,000 names.
Here we are, in our museum.
It has finally happened,
here in the Castle in Milazzo.
You can see the skeleton of the sperm whale Siso
inside a church.
This is the church of Santa Maria, which was built in 1527.
The sperm whale Siso
is positioned exactly where the altar of the ancient church was located.
Precisely to give a sense of sacredness to the story of Siso the Sperm Whale.
This church was then transformed, over the years,
and became a bastion,
the bastion of Santa Maria, like the church by the same name.
So the sperm whale is kind of protected, inside,
by this bulwark, by this castle.
A protection, in fact,
a champion of ecology, we could define it.
When I put together all the bones of the sperm whale
and rebuilt it after so many trips around Italy and Europe,
also with advice from all over the world,
even from Alaska,
I decided not to place the sperm whale too high up.
Everybody was saying,
“You have to put the sperm whale in such a way that people won't touch it!"
No, no, quite the opposite!
I wanted people,
not to really “touch the sperm whale"
but to empathise with the sperm whale itself,
to come closer to acknowledge
and touch the death of the sperm whale.
But it's the only dead thing in the whole museum.
The museum is made for kids.
So it is the only dead thing in the whole museum,
On the contrary, through an application of augmented reality,
the sperm whale comes to life and takes on a new life,
in such a way that the children
learn the lesson of the sperm whale that can die
but can also come back and speak.
And they are the real protagonists of the museum:
the children coming to the museum every day
and being passionate about this sperm whale
and carrying with them a very important message,
that they then pass on to other children
and especially to their parents, and other adults,
because that is precisely the category that we must reach.
We must reach adults through children.
And beyond these modern applications,
at the museum, all around the sperm whale, there are many works of art.
And we get to talk
about the sperm whale, about environmentalism through art,
through virtual reality, that fascinates kids, actually everyone.
This has allowed so many people
to really become passionate about the environment,
about this poor dead sperm whale.
And so, right on the beach near where the sperm whale died,
hundreds of people gathered to pick up trash.
We picked up and filled up more than two rubbish lorries
and took it away.
I participated in other initiatives after the museum opened,
such as swimming across the Strait of Messina,
dragging a lot of plastic,
to give the idea of this burden,
that humans carry across the world.
I hadn't taken into consideration the strong current,
and so that thing was virtually acting as a parachute
dragging me all the way to Sardinia.
But that's just one thing, a detail.
There was another thing I did that summer,
I left on this little four-meter sailboat
with no engine, just guided by the wind of the Aeolian Islands,
and I traveled around all the islands, with a specific goal,
that was not only to eat and swim
as I did,
but above all to be the voice of the sperm whale Siso,
so that everybody could learn about this important story,
and also to bring value to the natural heritage of our land.
Another consequence of the death and rebirth of this sperm whale
in 2018, and again this year,
an organisation, called Sea Shepherd,
carried out an operation to clean our sea
from all those illegal weapons that kill our sea
and that also killed the sperm whale Siso.
Sea Shepherd are those friends, the good pirates,
that we see blocking whale poaching operations all over the world.
And finally, here is the most beautiful photo, for me,
my greatest satisfaction:
all these happy children under the sperm whale.
That sperm whale that is no longer a symbol of death,
but rather a symbol of life, a sperm whale with a voice.
That same voice that spoke to me when he died,
now speaks to the children in the museum.
And you can see them, they are happy,
they're the ones who actually bring me --
they bring incredible things.
For example, very often parents call me
and say, "You're a disgrace! My son tells me
I must not eat tiny baby fish anymore, and we must use less plastic."
I'm very happy about that.
Children finally succeed in teaching their parents a lesson.
In the end, I think that we have an important obligation
towards these children.
A Navajo adagio says,
"We don't inherit the land from our fathers,”
we have an obligation to do so,
not just because we inherited it from our parents,
"but we borrow it from our children.”
So we have a double responsibility
and if we won't do it for us, at least we have to do it for them.
(Applause)