There are – I had never had the opportunity to investigate – armor-piercing, shrapnel projectiles, mainly explosives, machine guns, tracers, rocket assisted. There are bullets weighing hundreds of kilos. In this photograph, taken today in Mariupol, four bullets are seen on the windowsill of a building, next to the shards of glass. The billions of dollars, euros, of any currency in circulation spent on defense sound like an abstraction, but they are weapons. Not even in the most shocking photographs do you see them: you see the effect, on places, on houses, on people. For this, I chose a ‘cold’ image: to remind me of what war is done with.
Words are not enough. It is done with missiles, cannons, mortars, rockets. With the “dark and rusty” presence of the tanks. With bullets. It is not easy, in most cases it is practically impossible
remembering, recounting those lives and deaths connected with that aircraft mowed down in flight, with that rifle in arm dropped.
I take this sentence from a novel, intense, very dense, by Claudio Magris, “Non place to proceed”. It was released in 2015, and rereading it now impresses. It tells of a crazy, quixotic project: that of building an impossible “total war museum for the advent of peace and the deactivation of history”. Rooms displaying all sorts of weapons and war relics. It could serve as a warning to “all the living who prevent peace because they need war to live”.
In the intentions of the character of Magris, the indefatigable collector, the fire-breathing objects should have turned out to be “nightmares of a distressed and dissolved dream, a film projected in reverse that begins with death and destruction and ends with those people – first skipped in air, mangled or pierced – at the end happy and smiling “.
Perhaps this is the only way to understand. Seeing first the soldier “blown up on a mine” and then his life starting again – “his life that seemed to have vanished, yesterday’s hangover with his comrades, that evening on the unspeakably purple sea the day before yesterday, a kissed mouth many years ago, the crippled words of the child who was beginning to speak. ” Thus, the weapons that “believed, boasted, trumpeted to annihilate everything that came their way” would not have the last word.