Season 1 | Battle Royale
Gustì is small and thin. One day in 1915 he was an adolescent noob from the Bergamo countryside. The next day he is a soldier in the trenches. The administrator of the Kingdom of Italy catapults him into the map of the Great War. A small and reckless little man, he prepares his backpack, takes the train and goes to Battle Royal Piave. He starts well, with a purple skin! Enlisted in the Arditi. Special assault corps for hand-to-hand combat. He's part of a nice little group of pros thrown into the trenches with a 1v1 bladed weapon. When Battle Royale ends, a few Arditi are saved...including my grandfather, Gustì.
He returns home with the hero's pride, fine medals of valor, a huge dose of accumulated violence and a serious alcohol addiction. He could have become a war fool, but no. He marries a war widow and they have five children. As a civilian, he does all the most dangerous jobs. He is not a pro and he has a gold skin!!
Season 2 | Save the world
We are in the revealed site of Season 2 World War and Gustì is painting the highest flagpole of the Dalmine metal industry when the Americans bomb. He is thrown from 22 yards (20 meters) to the ground and saves himself. He returns home on foot while the streets are dripping with dying men transported on carts and the hospitals are full of bros hit. Then the war migrates to other continents and Gustì becomes a grandfather. A swarm of grandchildren is born in a short time. He likes to organize the Summer Night Convention in which the grandchildren sit on the porch in the evening listening to the fantastic Gustì Battle Royale.
"–I am stung on my forehead and I'm not afraid of anything. Killo with a bayonet, I remove the blade with my foot and go on. | I don't sleep for days and I don't feel fatigue. |
Once I save myself by jumping in the latrine. I have a tube to breathe, stand there immersed and out of sight while I feel the enemy breathing nearby. | In a Battle I hide under corpses"
For us children the grandfather’s conventions are amazing. The stories are shared with mimic sounds and gestures rooted in the memory of Gustì's body.
Season 3 | Creative mode
Summer Night Convention are epic and leave their mark. At the age of 8 I want to read The Count of Montecristo, at 11 I do detailed research on the forms of torture suffered by the Desaparecidos, in Brazil. As an adult my longest love is a war photographer. In 2003 I created a robotic work of art, a survivor chair that walks on the resilience of landmine survivors. In 2006 I created BUNKER relational art project on the silent memory of women during the Second World War. Crochet bombs are born.
I fund the Di + onlus association. In the meantime, I can hardly remember my grandfather anymore... He died a long time ago. But trying to understand why there is a thread that ties me to the war, I go back in family history and find him again. The idea that through his offsprings, Gustì's legacy of violence and pain is slowly being watered down. Of his 5 children, the firstborn is a daredevil, she marries 7 times. The second son, aggressive and overbearing, collects traces of the family's memory for a lifetime. Then the rational daughter arrives and the violence is diluted to the point that the last two children resemble each other in body and goodness of soul. 105 years later, I am here, publishing a post of the WE HOPE blog. I'm the age of my grandfather at the Gustì Summer Night Convention and I'm in Bergamo, Italy, grappling with a new challenge that is lasering the human being.
DISCOVER THE UPDATE OF Season 4 | Competitions in progress : Covid-19 ...
The author of the post is lauramorelli eu, relational artist and president of Di + onlus, a non-profit association, associate partner of WE HOPE
Last pictures : Bombe all'uncinetto, 2016, Mercy In-Site, Installation, Cappella San Francesco, Università Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore Milano.