Lifesaver, a gilded life-preserver made from concrete, it’s a sculpture that highlights two references, one historical and one to the present day. The historical significance is made visible by an original postcard dating from the year 1935, mounted alongside the sculpture: “L’oro alla patria” – gold for the fatherland – was a slogan of Mussolini’s fascist regime, introduced after the League of Nations (the predecessor organization to the UNO) had imposed economic sanctions on Italy because of its open aggression towards Ethiopia. As a high point of the campaign, on 18th December 1935 Mussolini declared the “Giornata della fede” (which has a double meaning in Italian: Day of Hope / Day of the Wedding Ring), a highly emotional, public ceremony in which gold and valuables were donated by the population to the fascist regime.

With respect to the present, the heavy stone life-preserver points to the actual situation concerning Eu immigration policy and Frontex military operations in the Mediterranean under the disguise of “humanitarian interventions”. Right wing (and in many cases also leftists-masked) white superior policies are reinforced and perpetuated in institutional politics from the local to the European level. They are “legal” but not for this reason legitimate. At the same time, some people are made “illegal” and looted of the legitimacy of existence. Treated either as dispensable lives (let to die) or as commodities (source for super profit). They are deprived of all citizenship rights and therefore made non-citizen. The hysteria around “illegal” migration thus is used to justify increases in defence budgets and spending on security technologies.