AGAINST WAR
looking and imagining

30.05__29.06.2025

Sala fontana, admission free
 

A project by EMERGENCY 

Curated by CHEAP 

AGAINST WAR looking and imagining30 May__29 June 2025
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The exhibition AGAINST WAR – looking and imagining is an EMERGENCY project curated by CHEAP, promoted by Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and produced and organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in conjunction with the NGO. 

The immersive tour is broken down into different visual levels and degrees of involvement, exploring the theme of war and its physical, psychological, social and political impact. The curators asked themselves whether it would be possible to penetrate, in an intimate yet not voyeuristic way, the stories of the victims and the resistance of those who oppose war by practising civil disobedience, protesting in public and calling for disarmament and solidarity. Or by healing the wounds of others, which is what EMERGENCY has been doing since May 1994, the date the organisation, which practises medicine also as a tool for peace, was founded.

Taken from its historical archive, large black-and-white photographs of EMERGENCY’S medical activities, from Afghanistan to Iraq, alternate with CHEAP’s posters from some of the most important interventions undertaken by the collective in recent years – Disobey with generosity, Sabotage with grace, Get agitated – and with those of the artists invited to take part in the exhibition, from Italy and Spain to Brasil and Poland.  Distant geographies and different sensitivities that share in the belief that, as the messages engraved throughout the exhibition explicitly state, no war is inevitable and war does not restore rights, it redefines powers. This is also shown by the images in a box sheltered by an arrow slit: photographs of people and their bodies overwhelmed by the violence of war but shielded and not on view, because they can only be seen if you draw close to the arrow slit. These are smaller, explicit, crude photographs that demand attentive, conscious contemplation: they are an appeal that EMERGENCY and CHEAP address to the public, a request to draw near and to shoulder responsibility.