L’APPESO

The figure of the hanging man refers, above all in the Italian collective memory, to the Mussolini's body dead, exposed at Piazzale Loreto.

The symbolism of the scene is clear: children, innocent and instinctual figures, are hungry for sugars, which they get by breaking the symbol whose imaginative strength has led Italy out of the dictatorship of the beginning of the century.

The body of the dictator is no longer a simple body, immediately becomes a representative symbol the fetish of an idea, a dark past lately forgotten or misunderstood.

The children, belonging to a generation distant from the historical fact, do not act with awareness attacking the puppet Mussolini, but are only interested the revenue of instant and fleeting satisfaction.

This work is intended to be an imaginative proposal for a monument to Piazzale Loreto in Milan. It wants to stimulate a reflection on the absence of memory by the nation that has "invented" Fascism.

There are too few monuments erected on the territory useful for the continuation of a memory in our view necessary so that certain monstrosities are not repeated: and it was precisely the feral exposure of the corpse that, symbolically, put an end to the previous atrocities in the minds of Italians.

That event, that image, however, have not been permanently documented, and the lack of memorials has inhibited the possibility of secularizing the event: even today, after more than half a century after the event, the positions of the Italian social and political world in this regard, they are very immature and discordant. Almost an incomprehensible emptiness had been generated, a cultural and historical taboo that drags itself into the future.

Thus, the new generations forget and reinterpret dangerously figures historical sadly important, but without the clarity of a well-fed collective memory.

On the other hand, the unawareness with which they are swallowing is well fed sweets coming from a monument broken and made illegible.

The sweets that come out of the figure are a reference to another of the symbols of the liberation of Europe from Nazism: the sweets and candies that the American soldiers used to give to the liberated populations.

Those same sweets became tools to distract our minds from building a just compromise with our history, in a sense, no longer ours. The desserts became information, lifestyle, imported and assimilated through the products of the then nascent economy: the prophecy enunciated by Pasolini, speaking of media fascism, and the dictatorship of the consumption.

It is a 3D sculpture, 2x2x3m available with VR, performed for Copula Mundi 2018, Florence in collaboration with Lorenzo Tonda(3D modellist and painter).