CHIARA BUGATTI:

BRUTE FORCE, IL BIGIO (FOOLISH)

The film Brute Force, Il Bigio (Foolish) is a newly produced film by artist Chiara Bugatti. Site proudly presented the video in full for one week open-access streaming, together with a text by Sascha Bru about the film and a short interview with Bugatti. After one week of open-access, an excerpt of the film is left on the webpage.

**Chiara Bugatti’s Brute Force, or, How to Rehearse a Monument**

Excerpt of text by Sascha Bru on Chiara Bugatti

Sascha Bru is a professor at the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven, with a strong interest in European avant-garde culture.

Chiara Bugatti’s film, Brute Force, Il Bigio (Foolish), revisits a dark page in the history of modernism. Central, yet nearly invisible, in the film is Arturo Dazzi’s 1930s Fascist monument, Era Fascista, which was designed to celebrate and immortalize the ideal of Fascist masculinity. Dazzi’s 750 cm high sculpture of a naked male figure is made from a single block of Carrara marble. It was inaugurated by Benito Mussolini on Marcello Piacentini’s Piazza del Vittoria in Brescia in 1932. Unlike Fascist monuments such as Guiseppe Terragni’s late Futurist or Rationalist Monumento ai caduti (Monument to the Fallen, 1930-33) in Como, Dazzi’s Era Fascista takes to the Classical idiom—and badly so; soon after its inauguration the monument got nicknamed Il Bigio, the foolish or ugly one. At the instigation of the Church, moreover, in 1933 a bronze fig leaf designed by Claudio Botta was added to cover the statue’s genitalia. After the Second World War the statue was removed and stored on the outskirts of the city of Brescia where it was kept outside a municipal storage building for decades, exposed to the elements. About ten years ago it was restored, wrapped in cloth and a container was built around it. The soil on which the monument rests today is poisoned by toxic waste.

While Brescia officials in recent decades have made it their business to restore part of Piacentini’s original Piazza - the plinth for Era Fascista, among others, has been rebuilt - debate on whether or not to also reintroduce Il Bigio on the square is ongoing. Hence, while the monument today is hidden from the eye in the public space, its memory, and that of the Fascist ideology it is supposed to immortalize, remains very much alive.

The nebulous state in which Dazzi’s monument today finds itself - it is unable to do its commemorative work as a public monument, and yet in its absence from the public space it continues to generate debate and project meaning - has been a rich source of inspiration to Bugatti of late. Since 2018 she has been creating an ensemble of works under the heading Brute Force that explores the negative condition of Dazzi’s monument and keeps generating new meanings for it. In collaboration with the Stuttgart Ballet, she set up a string of performances in which male dancers, placed on pedestals, “rehearse” poses like those of Dazzi’s statue. The dancers bring the ideal of Fascist masculinity come to life again only to bend it and wrest the male body today from the clutches of the Fascist past. Accompanying the dancers on the pedestals are knee-high cubes composed of diatomaceous earth or so-called “rotten stone,” a sedimentary rock made up of fossilized single cell algae whose formation takes about 12 million years.

Recalling the marble of Dazzi’s Era Fascista, these cubes gradually fall apart and disintegrate as the dancers’ bodies and feet hit the ground. Bugatti thereby not only exposes the tension that exists between, on the one hand, the hard, self-contained, and autarkic image of the Fascist Man, and, on the other hand, the porosity and fragility of the material that gives shape to it. She also opens up an experiential zone in which we come to regard the form, aesthetic, and history of the monument anew: not as an anthropomorphic shape, but as a metamorphic rock composed of millions of tiny particles; not as a punctual human intervention or an artistic creation, but as the result of a slow and random natural process of sedimentation whose longue durée far outdates the Ancient Rome that Mussolini’s Fascism sought to revive with its myth of romanità.

The film, Brute Force, Il Bigio (Foolish), further explores the negative condition of Dazzi’s monument. For the film, Bugatti teamed up, among others, with anthropologist and author Manuel Schwab, who wrote a poetic text to accompany the footage. Schwab’s poem puts the agency of the nonhuman center-stage, as it recounts the history of Dazzi’s monument from the perspective of the smallest particle of calcium carbonate lodged inside the marble statue. This smallest particle of the sculpture has only one desire: to be set free, to dissolve and to go back to being sand.

The idea of “rehearsal” which figures prominently in Bugatti’s collaboration with the Stuttgart Ballet is displaced in the film, in that it is no longer the monument’s bodily pose and contortion that the film seeks to revive and bend. Like the dance performances, the film “rehearses” the process of ecological formation and disintegration of the marble monument, yet in so doing it also more clearly “rehearses” the process of forgetting this monument, a process that has taken almost a century now without reaching completion.

For the ultimate question Bugatti’s endeavor poses is whether it is possible to construct a different kind of monument, an alter-monument, whose main function would not be to commemorate and conserve the brute force of the human past but to forget all about it, to consign it to oblivion. Bugatti’s subtle and supple project to rehearse the monumental act of forgetting can also be read as a timely one, injecting the emancipatory power of the imagination back into at times stale and mechanic discussions about contemporary cultures’ politics of remembrance and obliteration.

Image 1: Piazza della Vittoria, 1933. Courtesy of the Archive of Brescia municipality

Image 2: Aerial view on the area where Piazza della Vittoria was built. 1929. Courtesy of the Archive of Brescia municipality — Image 1: Piazza della Vittoria, 1933. Courtesy of the Archive of Brescia municipality Image 2: Aerial view on the area where Piazza della Vittoria was built. 1929. Courtesy of the Archive of Brescia municipality

A conversation between Chiara Bugatti (CB) and Power Ekroth (PE)

Chiara Bugatti is a visual artist based in Stockholm/Sweden. She holds a BA from the Art Academy in Venice, Italy and an MA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden (2016). She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitute in Stuttgart/Germany in 2020.

PE: Brute Force, Il Bigio (Foolish), is a film about a monument called "Era Fascista" made in marble for a town square in Brescia, Italy. The sculpture, depicting a man, was removed after WW2 and placed in storage. Can you tell me a little bit why you became interested in this sculpture and why you wanted to make this film?

CB: Upon returning from Germany and Austria, where the SS had held him prisoner for over two years, my grandfather worked as a rice-farmer and silkworm breeder in the countryside of Brescia. I visited the town for the first time in 2016 and I became interested in learning more about its complex history and my own.

Piazza della Vittoria caught my attention for its rather motionless beauty. The rationalist square, commissioned during the fascist regime and inaugurated in 1932, was turned into a parking lot after the war, but had been recently been reconstructed to look like the original piazza. Decentralized in the otherwise symmetrical plan, I noticed a big marble structure, similar to an empty plinth. I remember searching the Internet to find out more about such an unusual choice of renovation and I learned that the unoccupied platform—the one that had caught my sight—was a reproduction of the plinth that once hosted the monument Era Fascista by Arturo Dazzi. The sculpture was dismantled in 1945, but had been under restoration since 2013.

I started to follow the debates in local newspapers about the imminent relocation of the monument to the square. Some people proposed to move it into a (not yet existing) museum, others demanded its demolition. I became interested in the uneasy absence of the sculpture and in the expectations that came with it. The few pictures available online showed the figure before the restoration, a nude young boy made from a single block of Carrara marble (7,50 m tall, 52 tons) lying down on the bare soil, protected only by a precarious wooden roof and almost completely hidden by tall grass. It was too bulky to hide, too expensive to move, too valuable to destroy, and there was something about this vulnerability that really struck me. This, I realized, was what I wanted to document.

For over three years, most of my questions, letters, and calls to the municipality remained more or less unanswered, and in 2020 I received an invitation to finally visit the sculpture. I asked my friend, the filmmaker Achille Mauri, to accompany me; the exact location remained unspecified until the very last moment. Prior to our visit, we had to sign a special agreement in which we took responsibility for accessing an “hazardous area,” and we discovered that the sculpture was lying on a site contaminated by toxic waste. There, inside a big sealed container, wrapped in plastic and hanging on a robust iron structure, we found “Era Fascista”.

Stills from video Brute Force, Il Bigio (Foolish), 2021

The work unfolded gradually and acquired new layers of meaning throughout its process. The specific situation in which Il Bigio (the ugly one, as locals call this monument) finds itself, gave me the chance to reflect on the discourse about the removal of monuments and memorials—amplified after the protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement—as well as on the notions of toxicity, permeability, memory, time, responsibility, and our role (as humans) in relation to (natural) cycles.

The result of the site shootings was a short film, accompanied by a text produced in collaboration with writer and anthropologist Manuel Schwab.

PE: There are many interesting topics you touch upon here just briefly, and watching the film becomes even more intricate knowing this. I feel two themes to be particularly articulated in the film: a sense of the materiality itself (something I know has been a recurring theme in your works) and also the sense of ecology, and the environmental aspects. There is a huge debate about including the environment/the ecosystem and the soil rights that can be upheld by unilateral legislation and environmental policy, and you are here giving the material, the stone and its essence, a voice.

CB: I always consider materials as important vehicles of memory, identity and value. Part of the title, Brute Force, refers directly to the monument and its associations to ideals of fascist masculinity, but it also points in different directions.

Through the film I want to highlight the relationship between the brutality of seemingly innocent actions and the fragility of the ecosystems of which we are part. I am interested in addressing the extraction of marble itself as a violent act of removal, directed against the mountainous landscape of Carrara, and as a distinct example of exploitation of natural resources.

It was clear to me that there was a correspondence between this gesture and the ones happening around the contaminated area in which Il Bigio finds itself. The damage made to the land, caused by a former factory of pesticides, are less visible but equally brutal. Today, the existing soil is being dug out by bulldozers and replaced with new soil.

Consumerism has developed a tendency of wanting to separate ourselves from the natural world. Giving language—a soundless, timeless voice—to the calcium carbonate (inside the marble sculpture) and to the particle of polychlorinated biphenyl (in the soil) is an attempt to flatten the hierarchical system in which human development is always prioritized.

Satellite pictures on the marble quarries in Carrara (Italy), Google Earth, 2021. Views from the marble quarries in Carrara (Italy). 2019. Photo: Chiara Bugatti.

PE: I know you as an artist dealing with space, room, and material in combination, but I didn’t know you worked with video up until now. Tell me how the film relates to your other work?

CB: When you and I met each other for the first time in 2016, I was preparing my masters degree exhibition at Bildmuseet in Umeå. One of the works that I exhibited, But there were four seasons and the hours run their cycle between midday and midnight, consisted of 300 kg of finely crushed Alpine marble, filtered and washed by hand, raked on the floor in perfectly straight but precarious lines. I spent most of my life in Northern Italy and the weird elegance of marble have always intrigued me, the same kind of cold, motionless and monumental beauty that I found in Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia. In the exhibition at Bildmuseet I wanted to explore and present marble while depriving it of its monumental connotations. Instead, I wanted to talk about its malleability and about the fragility of the landscape where it belonged. The work covered approximately 45 square meters and was mistaken for a textile carpet by most of the audience—something that I hadn’t planned at all. After a first moment of surprise, I became interested in the sudden disruption that occurred when people walked on my work, leaving their marks on its surface. I realized that, from being somehow passive observers, people were becoming aware of their own presence in the space and of the consequences of their gestures. It became important to me to observe and reproduce this moment, so I decided to go back to the museum and restore the work every day, to prepare it to be destroyed over and over again.

"But there were four seasons and the hours run their cycle between midday and midnight." Alpine marble (crushed, filtered, washed, raked), 2016. Photo: Chiara Bugatti

"But there were four seasons and the hours run their cycle between midday and midnight."
Alpine marble (crushed, filtered, washed, raked), 2016.
Photo: Hanna Eriksson, VK — "But there were four seasons and the hours run their cycle between midday and midnight." Alpine marble (crushed, filtered, washed, raked), 2016. Photo: Hanna Eriksson, VK

Can an artwork fail? During my education I have learned that the passage of time and wear and tear should not concern art in the context of galleries and museums, or monuments in the public space. The work of art should look exactly the same over time. According to these statements, both my floor piece in Umeå (as most of my later works) and the sculpture “Era Fascista” are total failures. To me, though, it is relevant to use the exhibition space as a platform where I can create models, small-scale “test-environments” that function as mediums to explore the space we inhabit and reveal the complexity of its structure.

Since my degree exhibition I have been trying to re-stage these moments of disruption (and awareness) through spatial installations and sculptures. Working with materials allows me to highlight the “performative” qualities of objects and to re-create processes and phenomena in different space and time scales, making them easier to observe. For instance, what is the relation between the slow collapse of the natural environment on Earth and the rapid one of my sculptures? Where did they start and where will they end? How does our own scale (of being humans, having a body and a relatively short lifespan) change the way we perceive things?

I imagine the film to be installed in a space together with other kinds of works. In the meantime, I have started a new collaboration with the ballet company Das Stuttgarter Ballet in Germany. There, with choreographer Alessandro Giaquinto, I am working on the performance Rehearsing Brutality, until it’s totally destroyed, where a group of dancers inhabit the exhibition space together with fragile cubic objects made out of diatomaceous earth (a soft organic powder made out of fossilized single-cell algae used by Alfred Nobel to stabilize dynamite, and employed today as building material). The dramaturgy of their movements mirrors another model of mine, A Place of Fantastic Flora/Brute Force (study), in which tiny freshwater snails consume a gelatinous piece of spirulina and cause its original shape to change and break apart over time.