Approximation to the West (2013-2016)

“Memory has been fully absorbed by its meticolous reconstitution. Its new vocation is to record; delegating to the archive the responsibility of remembering.” Pierre Nora

Approximation to the West seeks to reveal instances of forgotten pasts through the collection and re-dissemination of historical information combined with the use of photography, drawing, installation and reenactments of the archive.
As a starting point, we analyzed a peculiar cultural landscape in North-Eastern Italian Alps, named Carnia. Here people admit that they can’t recognize themselves in the places they belong to, a consequence of the industrial development that started in the 1960s and led to radical transformations in the landscape.
Then, we address a series of events from the tail end of WWII, when Carnia region became the promised land of about 40.000 Cossacks escaped from the Soviet Union, who joined the Nazi army in order to recover the freedom they lost almost twenty years before, during the October Revolution. The invaders took over the region and local population was subjected to their rule. The occupation lasted until April 1945, when the Cossacks were defeated and ultimately expelled from this territory. The occupiers were then traded by the Allied forces in exchange for hundreds of thousands of British prisoners of war held by the Soviets.
We appropriated of this story as a metaphorical key thanks to which we can pose questions about some issues characterizing the present, like the contemporary crisis of identity, the rise of new fascist and nationalist movements, and the end of the concept of nation, in an attempt to depict the changes following the decline of the West.