Question of Time, 1996
Metal drills and wood, variable dimensions
 

 

 

Question of Time (1996), where aliens expectedly come from the ground, by breaking through the planetary crust with two huge drills, something that also overturns ordinary perception, as if the Earth was in fact the aliens’ underground terrain, and human settlements were akin to oil deposits to bedrilled until exhaustion. I knew where the image of the drills cam from: from Japanese anime, the animated cartoons featuring mega-robots and galactic conflicts that were very popular in Italy during my childhood. I saw loads of them when I was a little girl. I remained glued to the screen for hours and hours on end to watch Goldrake, Jeeg, Mazinga, Gundam, Daitan. It was perhaps beginning with this artwork that I no longer passively conserved images accumulated from when I was a little girl, and my creative process got under way. They were like residues, elements that had remained fixed in some corner of my mind, and which now demanded to be revisited and revised. Every single frame of those cartoons contains an apocalyptic depiction of violence, itself a by-product of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is truly difficult for a child to digest. It is an extremely powerful idea of total destruction. Cartoons pose a truly fundamental problem. Do they really have the power to exorcise evil characteristics latent in every human being, or are they themselves an agent that shapes minds, inducing them to accept violence and strife as values inherent to humankind?