Acies

Aciēs (/ˈa.ki.eːs/)
1 sharpness, sharp edge, point;
2 battle field, battle line, array;
3 sight, glance;
4 pupil of eye.

Did you see the war?
- Felix Guattari, 1996.
Acies is an exhibition that responds to the concept of war by investigating
its visual and iconographic aspects. The Latin word Aciēs , with its multiple
meanings, discloses the aim of this exhibition, that is to comment on the
correlation between spectacle and war.
This new body of work could be seen as a visual response to the fictional
representation of warfare given by the media, as well as an examination of
how contemporary society reacts to the way modern conflicts are portrayed.
Instead of focusing on images that are usually associated with the context
of war (e.g. bodies, blood, weapons), this new body of work investigates on
the peripheral imagery. Objects, images and motifs that are part of a warrelated
scenario but not usually a primary symbolisation of it (e.g. textures,
maps, songs, monuments).

Incipit
In the early 90’s, I was watching television with my mum. This
was the first time I saw images of a conflict. Must have been the
Gulf war or Bosnian war. This sight made me very uncomfortable
and so I asked my mum what exactly war was. Obviously, I knew
what war was from school, books, movies and so on, but this was
the first time it seemed real to me. So I asked for clarifications.
She caressed me and said to me that ‘war is just on the TV’.
16/17 January 1991 - Italian TV presenter Emilio Fede
announces the beginning of the Gulf war during the evening
edition of Studio Aperto. Studio Aperto was the first programme,
from a private network, that presented live coverage of news,
to broadcast nationally in Italy.
Alessandro Di Massimo

A story for war, a story about war
So, one way of posing the question of who
“we” are in these times of war is by asking
whose lives are considered valuable,
whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
are considered ungrievable.
Judith Butler 1
Walking through Acies, we will be thinking about war, representations of
war, and the politics that war sustains and is sustained by.
Opening Acies is Battlefield, a sculptural installation that borrows its visual
elements from two Roman objects: vexillum, a type of Roman standard,
used during war to mark a troop’s assembly point or the location of the
commander; and Vettweiss – Eroitzheim, a dice tower made in the 4th
century AD. The bronze dice tower was created to allow the trustworthy
throw of dice and was probably gifted to now unknown soldiers after
winning a battle; it consisted of a horizontal tower, open on the top so as
to allow the throw of one or more dice that would then exit from the below
steps to land on the surface underneath. For Battlefield, Alessandro has
reproduced the entire edifice of the vexillum, rendering it with wood and
a military camouflage patterned fabric banner that reads ‘HOSTIS DELETA
LUDITE SECURI’ [The enemy is defeated, play in safety] – part of the text
that is carved on the dice tower. Next to the vexillum, two dice, somewhat
resembling those that could have been used when playing with the tower,
are placed on a grey plinth, the typical structure for exhibiting sculptures/
valuable objects within a gallery/museum. Battlefield reenacts the original
purpose of the tower, inviting audiences to play with the dice, as the banner
emphatically announces, in safety. However, in the case of Battlefield, the
dice are plastic camouflage patterned; mass produced cheap objects, an
ironic interpretation of the original hand-crafted bronze roman artifact. Given
that an interaction occurs, spectators, who have now become participants,
partake into a celebratory activity, during which what is celebrated is the
1 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), p. 38

defeat of an enemy. Who is the enemy?
Following the World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September 2001, the
rhetoric of the dangerous Other, primarily the terrorist, replaced the rhetoric
of the uncivilised other and in tandem, fear began shaping the contemporary
subject. Capitalising on this fear, George W. Bush, on 16 September 2001,
officially announced the ‘war on terror’, marking a new era of warfare
which has materialised into various zones of conflict, fifteen years later
still unfolding. Fear, whose presence requires the existence of an enemy, is
well discussed in discourse pertaining to contemporary hegemonic politics.
Indicatively, Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence acutely
describes how contemporary politics is ‘post-political bio-politics’, a mode
of politics that allegedly leaves behind the traditional ideological struggles
to focus on citizens’ safety and well-being. In the realm of this politics, one
succumbs to dominant apparatuses as long as her bios [life] is permeated by
the need to be saved from the dangerous Other who, in one way or another,
threatens her safety. As Žižek puts it, [...] at the zero level of politics, the
only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people,
is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. [...] [F]ear of
immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of excessive
state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe,
fear of harassment’. 2
The enactment of the above dice-rolling celebrations within a gallery compels
thinking on the difference and distance between, for instance, a battlefield
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or the battered borders between Syria and Turkey
and an art context – and, therefore, the Western context – within which we
are invited to celebrate our safety, namely, the distance between the West
and the East. This distance is the one that underpins the ethical demand of a
western intervention in the name of humanity’s comfort and prosperity, in the
sense that dwelling on this distance can lead to a sense of insurmountable
difference between the West and the East, and when this difference is taken
with the added implication that the West is more favourable, we reach the
conclusion is that the West must be protected. But isn’t this an ‘’ethical
illusion’’, which is underlined by religious distance and the great narratives of
modernity whose subject believed that he was universal and consequently
compelled to level anything different to him, as anything different would
be deemed wrong? Hence, Žižek wonders ‘why should Kissinger, when he
2 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Profile, 2008), pp. 34-35

ordered the carpet bombing of Cambodia that led to the death of tens of
thousands, be less of a criminal than those responsible for the Twin Towers’
collapse? Is it not because we are victims of an ‘’ethical illusion’’’? 3
Opposite from Battlefield, Cold War Camouflage is a devised map perforated
by spike studs that depicts, at least once, all the country members of the
NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – and the former Warsaw Pact,
formally known as Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance.
The Warsaw Pact was a military alliance signed in 1955 between the
Soviet Union and the seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern
Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland
and Romania. The Warsaw Pact was formed to counter the NATO treaty
signed in 1949 between the countries of the West due to fear of further
communist expansion. This plotted map is rather confusing, disclosing no
factual information whatsoever regarding the members of the treaties and
their involvement with the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. The depicted
countries are hardly identifiable; as Alessandro explains, ‘[t]he countries
deprived of their position are now “downgraded” to shapes. The land masses
pictured here are not anymore parts of a map, they are the elements of a
pattern’. 4 Cold War Camouflage and its pattern of war discloses war as a
primary means of organising society – a notion supported by the fact that
the Cold War has been replaced by the ‘war on terror’, a subject pondered
above and within War Map that follows.
Just to the left of Cold War Camouflage, War Map, a subversion of
conventional political world map, is mounted on the wall, both folded and
unfolded. All countries of War Map are printed in a military camouflage motif
that at once separates them into nation-states and unites them through the
various hues of the military pattern. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, namely in the terrain of de-centralised global
capitalism, the Cold War was consigned to the past and war in general was
considered, at least for a while, to be a means of obsolete nation-stateorientated
politics and economy. 5 Nevertheless, after the attacks of 9/11
and the subsequent invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan, war (on terror) and its
affect became, in Marxist sociologists and political theorists Michael Hardt
3 Ibid., p. 38
4 Alessandro Di Massimo, unpublished working notes, 2017
5 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued this in their influential book about globalisation, see
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

and Antonio Negri’s words, a ‘permanent social relation’. 6 This global war, of
which ‘war on terror’ is just an aspect, is consistent with the new globalised
environment; in the regime of globalisation the limits of war, namely its
spatial location and temporal extension, are indeterminable in the sense
that there is not a specific target – a physical base, an enemy – that needs
to be destroyed in order for war to come to an end. 7 War Map, a pun on
conventional World Maps, depicting all countries using a camouflage pattern
of four colours, functions as a symbol of a war that has acquired planetary
dimensions.
Between War Map and Cold War Camouflage stands 21 July 2001, a
sculptural installation that combines two of the most recognizable symbols
of struggle. In the corner of the room, to the right of the War Map, on a
small plinth stands the sculpture of Michelangelo’s David (1501-1504), a
reproduction significantly smaller than the original, just 45*20 cm, looking
delicate and vulnerable but also confident and revoltful – for this small
David wears a black balaclava and stands next to a red fire extinguisher. On
the floor next to the plinth lies a printed article, published by BBC on 23 July
2001 that titles ‘Arrest at G8 Death Protest’; the article tersely describes a
demonstration outside the Italian Embassy in London that started due to
‘the death of 23-year-old Italian anti-capitalist protester Carlo Giuliani, shot
dead by paramilitary police in Genoa on Friday’. 8
On 21 July 2001 – the title of this installation – Carlo Giuliani was shot
dead by riot police at anti-globalisation protests that occurred during the
27 th G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. This Summit is commemorated within neo-
Marxist discourse as the apogee and violent suppress of an active antiglobalisation
movement that began with protests during the 1988 Annual
Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, that
took place in West Berlin and culminated and became well known to a wider
public after the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’, demonstrations in occasion
6 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin Press, 2004), p. 12
7 For an analysis about the status quo of the ‘war on terror’, see Ibid. and specifically pp. 3 – 32.
For a discussion exclusively about the impossible task of the ‘war on terror’, namely to eliminate
every terrorist, see Itty Abraham, “Torture and ‘War on Terror’”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.
41, no. 39, 2006, pp. 4102–4102.
8 ‘Arrests at G8 death protest’, BBC, 23 July 2001, available at http: /news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
uk/1451973.stm
‘Paramilitary’ is mistakenly used in this BBC article as the Carabinieri to which it refers is a military
–and not paramilitary – force that is afforded police duties.

of World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999. 9 The picture
of Giuliani’s dead body with the balaclava and the red fire extinguisher
has been circulated widely and become a symbol of the anti-globalisation
movement. To compose 21 July 2001, Alessandro borrowed from the fatal
scene, the fire extinguisher and Giuliani’s balaclava to dress David, one of the
emblematic objects of Western culture and so-called humanitarian axioms
of Renaissance, a reference that stands in incongruous juxtaposition to the
days of the anti-globalisation protests in Genoa during which occurred ‘[...] a
plethora of documented cases of human rights violations against protesters
[...]’. 10
On the right of Cold War Camouflage, Big Hits is a colour video that consists
of footage entirely found on the World Wide Web. In 15 minutes, Big Hits
displays in chronological order footage of 33 wars that happened between
1983 – the year Alessandro was born – and 2016. Each year signals the
beginning of a different war, which hasn’t necessarily ended. Each footage is
accompanied by a different soundtrack, the song that was the best-selling
song in the UK during the year that the war began, sung as in a karaoke
by Alessandro himself; for instance, the video starts with the Invasion of
Granada and the song Karma Chameleon by Culture Club; 1984 follows with
the Siachen Conflict and the song Do They Know It’s Christmas? by Band
Aid. For Big Hits, Alessandro sourced 30 seconds of footage for each war.
For wars that took place closest to 1983, footage was hard to find, whilst
when found was not long enough and therefore different clips had to be
edited together. On the contrary, for wars closest to today, representations
were found in abundance and great variation. Alessandro tried to remain
as peripheral as possible, to avoid guns, battlefields and bodies in action,
but for the earliest wars, this was not always possible due to the limited
selection of footage available, at least publicly.
From the first year, 1983, to the last, there is a remarkable divergence
in how war is captured. For instance, the Second Chechen War, 1999,
starts with Britney Spear’s Baby One More Time and a long procession of
soldiers walking over what looks like a bridge; some of the soldiers directly
9 For a thorough discussion about the demonstrations and police brutalities surrounding the
27 th G8 Summit and their ramifications to the antiglobalisation movement that also takes into
consideration the attacks on 9/11 and how they have impacted the movement, see Heather
Gautney, Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era: NGOs, Social Movements, and
Political Parties (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and specifically, ‘The Alternative Globalization
Movement and the World Social Forum’, pp. 13-42.
10 Ibid., p. 46

acknowledge the camera by waving to it; while still streaming footage from
the same war, the shot suddenly changes and now we see two soldiers in
an unrecognisable outdoor location, one of them lying down holding his
gun and the other’s hand holding a cigarette; the shot changes again and
we are taken to an outdoor location packed with a mass of soldiers with a
soldier standing out in the front of the scene staring at a hand that holds
a cigarette; then abruptly, a jump cut to the smoking cigarette and thus
the footage of 1999 comes to an end. Alessandro has assembled quite a
different representation for the Syrian Civil War, 2011, using a video that
was broadly circulated online. This extremely low resolution video is taken
by a mobile phone whose owner was killed during the filming of this very
video by the man whom he was filming standing on the roof of the opposite
building. As Big Hits moves towards 2017, lo-fi clips taken using mobile
phones, speak for the now innumerable available representations of war
and thus for the so-called democratisation of the pictorial archive as digital
media has allowed the documentation and subsequent circulation of events
that were impossible with older analogue technology.
Big Hits’ overtly edited footage, its concealed online source and the singing
voice of the artist comment on the inability of representation to speak an
unequivocal truth, as every representation is ideologically constructed, in this
instance by the artist, in the sense that is framed, selected or entirely omitted.
The unconventional combination of war footage and hit songs, mostly
cheerful ones, alludes to the mass-media construct of excessive amounts of
images under the weight of which underlying realities of representations are
reduced into an easily-consumed spectacle, or others are simply suppressed.
Indeed, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, images of the collapse of the
Twin Towers circulated widely and rapidly, becoming the archetypal symbol
of the ‘war on terror’. On the other hand, Žižek, in his Violence, recalls that
while the atrocity of the events of 9/11 was constantly presented in the
mainstream media, al- Jazeera TV was condemned for allying with the
‘terrorists’ when it streamed the bombardment of Fallujah by the US. 11 This
was the beginning of an ongoing war of images as all the parties involved in
the conflict were very well aware of the power of spectacle, especially with
its ability to diffuse into innumerable screens across the globe. For, as art
11 Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, p. 38
For a thorough analysis of how ‘frames of war’ shape the decision, to borrow Judith Butler’s
words, ‘to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the live of others’,
see Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?; for the quote, see p. 38; for a discussion specifically
about ‘war on terror’, see pp. 33-102.

historian T. J. Demos put it, ‘there is no conflict without war of images’. 12
In light of this, there is, on the one hand, a rampant proliferation of images
that undermines our apprehension and shapes our fears and desires;
and on the other, due to the increasing so-called democratisation of the
pictorial archive, an opportunity to intervene in hegemonic representations,
the knowledge they produce and legitimise, and the ethics and politics of
fear they sustain. In a short essay title ‘Documentary Uncertainty’, artist
and theorist Hito Steyerl, discussing the affects of an uncertainty resulting
from mainstream broadcasting, called artists to organise the inundation of
images and disclose the politics that inform their imagery and circulation.
She posited, ‘[f]inding a critical position with respect to these images [...]
means replacing the set of affects which is connected to this uncertainty –
namely stress, exposure, threat and a general sense of loss and confusion
– with another one’. 13 Alessandro’s decision to use peripheral imagery to
refer to war, such us the camouflage pattern that appears predominantly
within the exhibition, not only adds to the abundance of different images
that can be created or chosen to speak about warfare but also partakes
into the history of various artists whose work negates the fear and paranoia
resulting by the ubiquitous representations of blood, bodies, battlefields,
guns, coffins etc. Artists like Thomson & Craighead have chosen to reveal
the ideologies that underline representations. Some like Thomas Hirschhorn
have chosen to show the sheer brutality of war – bodies entirely shattered,
both black and white – and thus shake the ethical illusion that excuses socalled
western intervention and the death of the Other.
Acies tells us a story about war, a story about representations of war and
a story about how representations tell us the story that we tell about war.
Anastasia Philimonos
12 T. J. Demos, Zones of Conflict (New York: Pratt Manhattan Galley, 2009), p.3
For a succinct discussion about ‘the war of images’ that uses examples such as the photographs
of Sadam’s dental examination, the leaked Abu Ghraib photos and the Fallujah photographs, see
W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Cloning: The War of Image 2001-2004’ in Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon
(eds), The Life and Death of Images (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 179-207.
13 Hito Steyerl, ‘Documentary Uncertainty’, 2007, available online at journal Re-visiones, http: /
www.re-visiones.net/spip.php%3Farticle37.html

This publication accompanies:
ACIES
an exhibition by Alessandro Di Massimo
17 - 24 November 2017
The Number Shop Studios and Gallery
Edinburgh
Published by Alessandro Di Massimo, 2017
All the images © of the artist
Texts © by Anastasia Philimonos, Alessandro Di Massimo