City of Saints and Madmen

The exhibition "City of Saints and Madmen" was created during a stay in the Italian harbour town of Taranto. Like many German cities, Taranto was extensively bombed as a naval base during the Second World War. Only the dilapidated island in the old town centre still bears visible witness to the city's history, which dates back to well before antiquity. This trauma and the omnipresence of Europe's largest steelworks with its devastating effects on the city, the environment and people have prevented Taranto from falling into the mannerism of museum-like complacency that seems to dominate southern Italy. After an intensive artistic exploration of German fascism, in particular the Shoah, ruin values and transgenerational trauma, Taranto offered the opportunity to pursue similar 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. And even if the Italian structures appear almost feminine in comparison to their Teutonic counterparts, the angularity is hidden underneath and, depending on their position, reaches down to the seabed. Could the neurotic architecture then have an impact on life in the water below? The magical realist Jeff Vandermeer - the title comes from one of his books - would at least consider the possibility. Bunker ruins lovingly restored to their original smoothed state by militarists bear witness to a reality that is anything but magical. 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.