Acies

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