City of Saints and Madmen

The exhibition "City of Saints and Madmen" was created during and after a stay in the Italian harbour town of Taranto. After an intensive artistic exploration of German fascism, the Shoah, ruin values and transgenerational trauma, Taranto offered the opportunity to mirror my investigations in the archaic Salento, which is interwoven with its rituals and mythologies. The endless row of bunker ruins on the coast can be read as an absurd attempt to place the infinite size of the ocean under surveillance. At least that's how Paul Virillo described it when looking at the National Socialist Atlantic Wall in France. But unlike the somehow stranded German concrete blocks, Mussolini's bunkers stand on rock above the sea. Its angularity is hidden underneath and, depending on their position, reaches down to the seabed. Could the neurotic architecture and its enbeded evil have an impact on life in the water below? Or did the absurdity of the control mania become a harsh reality the moment a freighter of the globalised overseas trade brought Xylella fastidiosa to the Salento? The bacterium, whose name seems to be taken from an ancient mythology, has since been destroying olive trees across the board, some of which are so old that they may have been growing at that very time.