Picnic o Il buon soldato - Rancio (1998)

Picnic o Il buon soldato (Picnic or The Good Soldier) is an exhibit structured on two levels: movement and action / stasis and contemplation. The performance and the works conceived by Fabio Mauri on the theme of war, and of peace as involuntary wait, are created using original everyday objects dating back to the war period. It is a wait that has within it something lively, without sadness, but that cannot avoid the cruel and flippant violence of conflict. The exhibition is a metaphor for life. Nature becomes stagnant nature, dried up by a real death that prevails upon everything. In the performance, the sweetness of life and bitterness of death weave together and fall upon things. As in a single long frame taken from a war film, a girl, in the presence of a clumsy young soldier, distributes warm broth to the people present, whilst the film “Ballad of a Soldier” by Grigorji Chukhraj is projected on the back of a young woman. (Dora Aceto)