Humana Natura Mortua
Anti-war event in Verona, Italy
In November of 2016 tourists and residents of Verona could notice strange objects displayed in the windows of La Biblioteca Civica right in the city centre. There were artillery shells, military helmets, antiques and many black-and-white photos depicting decay and devastation. Along with them one could notice graphic portraits of some strangers from all over the world.
That was Humana Natura Mortua, the exhibition advertised by A-Rivista Anarchica simply as ‘Contro la guerra’ (‘Agaist the war’). Two authors from Verona, Claudio Bighignoli and Giulio Spiazzi, displayed results of more than twenty years of wandering around the territories of countries at war.
However Humana Natura Mortua (HNM) is not only and not so much about atrocities of war, but about insensitivity in the modern world. As philosophers write,
Evil … reveals itself in failing to react to someone else’s suffering, in refusing to understand others, … and in eyes turned away from a silent ethical gaze.
The authors of the exhibition chose the right mood to speak to the world where violence and war conflicts don’t strike a chord anymore.
Giulio Spiazzi contributed to HNM with his photographs brought from Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Israel-Palestine and the former USSR.
The shots are not typical war footages though. They represent concrete moment of time and mood captured by the eyewitness in the lands of misery. It can be a peaceful still life in a village hit by the war, a trench left in a rush by retreating troops, an abandoned military base, or just public reaction expressed in protest posters or children’s art.
One of the the most powerful images was a child’s drawing shot in Afghanistan. Giulio Spiazzi said that at first he hadn’t had any idea of what it was. But after processing the film the shape of an armed helicopter drawn on the ground became obvious.
The Motherland Monument (taken in Kiev in 1989) represents ‘the shield of the USSR’, under which many people in the post-Soviet countries are still seeking security and certainty.
This pursue for stability provokes such conflicts as ‘Donbass blackhole’ (metaphorically shown in the picture from Kubinka, Russia).
All the objects in the photographs are silent witnesses of the war, the human element is absolutely absent. People appear in the portraits created by Claudio Bighignoli in a strongly realistic manner “like in front of the camera flash”.
“It is a fading gallery. I tried to give identity to the people Giulio met”, the illustrator says.
Some pictures portray real people like British MP Jo Cox, some of them were seen by Giulio Spiazzi during his journeys, some images were just inspired and embodied by the war reports.
Nowadays (as Leonidas Donskis pointed out) “we have become accustomed to regarding a human being as a mere statistical unit.” It does not come as a shock to us to find about human deaths and evolving war conflicts. That’s why it is important to draw attention to concrete people and situations instead of temperate casualty figures provided by TV news.
The authors of HNM put some the images into old drawers of a cupboard. They remind “old pieces of furniture in our grandparents’ houses, where pictures of the deceased always used to be”.
Inside the library some photographs were installed in dioramas meant “to transport the viewer to the land visited by the photographer”.
Claudio Bighignoli and Giulio Spiazzi managed to avoid a common pitfall of the post-truth era — manifestation and global use of others’ biographies, intimacies, lives and experiences. The latter captures the audience far more easily but symbolises colonisation of privacy, insensitivity and meaningless.
La Biblioteca civica di Verona is the right place for an anti-war exhibition. First, it is located in the city centre between Casa di Giuletta and ancient Roman gates Porta Leoni. Moreover, the previous building of the library (situated in the deconsecrated Church of San Sebastiano) was almost completely destroyed by the Allied bombing raid on January 4, 1945. The new building designed by Pier Luigi Nervi was opened only on June 2, 1980.
text — Nikolay V. Malinin, photos — @kinoed & @oredredred
