La Gara

The art work belong to the cycle called “War Games”. It can be technically intended as a ready-made, since the used bombs are true, not armed, war finds from the Second World War. Originally, they have been used to set up a temporary monument to the memory of people dead in an old Italian town that was destroyed by the explosion following the bombing of a Nazi train full of arms. This is the history of the bombs, and the epic meaning of destruction is exactly what they represent. This art work is almost naturally collocated in that archive going from the ancient times war representations to triumph arcs, from battle paintings to the smart war monitors and the consequent loosing of any tragic meaning, underlining the cutting edge between lived and described war. To climb a podium as final act of a competition recalls that arms race characterizing our and every “civil” society, always occupied in setting up armies and destruction methods. My intention, while thinking the structure, was to describe the paradox of this attitude and to protect the future memory, with a certain dose of irony. “La Gara” is then proposed exactly as the wreck of what dramatically it represents: the art of war. Full of horror and destruction, but always art. A game, in which everybody is always losing.