impop
arrigo musti
ImPop
inside the place of history
UNder Surfaces
UNder Surfaces SRB serie
varnish on broken glasses, watches, necklaces..
on iron
2 panels
Cm 70x70x7
2022
Srebrenica Memorial
In the physical installation Under Surfaces, permanently exhibited at the Srebrenica Memorial in Bosnia and Herzegovina, personal effects—deliberately shattered—lose their function and original hues: these fragments, mute witnesses, take on the character of remnants of tragedies that retain an anthropological value deeply tied to hope and its dissolution. Memory appears as a holdfast hidden beneath the monochromatic surface of a vivid color: this chroma does not celebrate but demands attention, resisting the greyness of oblivion.
Indifference and habituation to historical horrors produce an emotional detachment that turns the other, the community, into a nuisance or merely an object of self-concern. Even memory becomes burdensome.
I am working on the video installation that takes up the physical work at the Srebrenica Memorial; I wanted to document this disorientation: among the distracted crowd treading on the large projected image of the work, one man stands out, concerned that his shoes might get dirty, without even understanding that beneath his steps there was no material but projection—emblematic of contemporary blindness.
If asked how I would describe this human tendency today, I would depict it, provocatively intended, precisely like this: an apparent self-care that masks a blind indifference to collective memory, a care that prefers the cleanliness of one’s shoes to the remembrance of the dead.
All we Need Is Fun" is a video-installation inspired by one of the two physical installations permanently displayed at the Srebrenica Memorial (Bosnia and Herzegovina), titled Under Surfaces No. 1 (Blindness - Cecità), which evokes the blindness of the Dutch battalion of the United Nations (blue patches) that abandoned thousands of Bosniaks to their tragic fate in July 1995.
Faced with such an avoidable horror — a mistake — the viewers seem deliberately indifferent to the meaning of the work, and by extension to the massacre, distracted by a game placed to their left, a sort of "Tetris" made of bananas, more relaxing and less demanding.
ImPop means reflecting what exists even when the theme is immaterial, such as contemporary indifference and nihilism.
Feelings can be represented.
Only art can do that.
Naturally I played with the colors that represent the genocide scene.
Beyond the broken glasses (which need no explanation) and the bananas (allusive of contemporary art, long polarized for decades by provocation for its own sake), orange represents the color of the Netherlands, which after this scandal saw its government, years after the worst massacre in the West since World War II, resign en masse.
Only the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, now under the Mechanism and led by the current Chief Prosecutor of the IRMCT, brought the Serbian generals responsible for the massacre to justice.
Today, under general indifference, what is being debated is not the crimes themselves but the very need for international justice and multilateralism.