Exploded Views (on dropping bomb*shells)

A bomb without an explosion

To walk into a war museum today is to step into a hush that pretends the guns have fallen silent. Glass vitrines, flags, medals, didactic panels; a climate-controlled calm that sits uneasily over a continent where war has once again become daily news. Outside, screens deliver a rolling cascade of images from Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and countless other sites of conflict. Inside, the remnants of earlier wars have settled into the status of history. The museum becomes a device in which time is frozen and held outside the flux of events, not unlike a cemetery, and the contrast is sharper when time outside is moving fast and dangerously, when real lives are being lost in their hundreds of thousands. The room is quiet. The air is cool. The bombs are elsewhere.

It is precisely this disjunction that the curatorial project entitled On Dropping Bomb*shells has tried to hold open. The project began from a simple idiom — “to drop a bombshell” — and from the decision to take it literally, then bend it back toward its figurative use. The bomb is an explosion, a technique of killing and intimidation. A bombshell is also an announcement, a revelation timed for maximum shock. Between the two sits a whole apparatus of staging, mediation and memory. Who is allowed to speak as they drop their bombshell, and who is silenced. Who lives with unexploded munitions in their soil, and who experiences conflict only as a distant feed. Who gets monuments and anniversaries, and who is folded into statistical abstractions. On Dropping Bomb*shells insists on attending to those anonymous lives, bringing their existential problems back out of the smokescreen of proliferating images that risk producing only apathy.

This book, Exploded Views (on dropping bomb*shells), is the third act of the series. It is a catalogue for those exhibitions only in a limited sense. It does not simply document what was shown, nor does it claim to fix the meaning of the works. Instead, it treats the exhibitions as starting points from which to “explode” a series of views on war: to pull apart their elements, to follow their trajectories into philosophy, anthropology, media theory, art history and curatorial reflection, then to set these fragments into new constellations. The bomb here is analytical as well as lethal. To explode a view is to dismantle the illusion of a single, indisputable picture of war.

Three acts of On Dropping Bomb*shells

Act I: Deserted Island took place in Bologna in early 2024, during ART CITY. Seven time-based works by artists and collectives David Birkin, Genny Petrotta, g. olmo stuppia, Hussein Nassereddine, Raqs Media Collective, Stefano Cagol and Arianna Marcolin traced lines between the city’s own bombing memory and wider histories of state violence, environmental devastation and media opacity. Birkin’s Charade (2018) used the eponymous parlour game to stage the unspeakable crimes concealed by a secret British directive authorising intelligence agents to break the law; the audience saw only gestures, never the words, yet the shape of violence was unmistakable. Petrotta’s Kumeta (2023) polished a marble quarry wall overlooking Piana degli Albanesi into an austere memorial surface, reopening the story of the short-lived Peasant Republic and its repression at the end of WW2. Raqs’ Deep Breath (2019) inscribed an aphorism on the seabed between shipwrecks, suggesting that the sea itself has become an archive of things that defy the erasure of memory. Nassereddine's Two Birds, Sleeping (2022) was a visual conversation that, through poetic images, reactivated the memory of his Lebanese village of origin, which has been razed to the ground several times. Cagol’s Mònito – Monition – Mort Nucleàire (2019) stretched the sound of a nuclear test into a chilling, symphonic drone, revealing the “soul of the bomb” as an eerie music rather than a single instant of impact. Sposare la notte (2022) by G. Olmo Stuppia intertwined participatory performance and poetic evocation to tell the story of territories and ecologies.

In this act, the bomb appears as a delayed, distributed phenomenon. Violence is present as contamination, as acoustic residue, as the polished absence of torture marks on a quarry face, as the missing shoes of civilians turned into a waltz for borrowed feet in A Waltz for Sarajevo (2017), a participative performance by Arianna Marcolin. The exhibition’s title, Deserted Island, suggests both isolation and experiment: a laboratory where different histories of war, censorship and extraction can be staged together, far from the frontlines yet haunted by them. The title itself is borrowed from a 1953 essay by Gilles Deleuze, written under the horizon of the Cold War and the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which the deserted island figures a place of emergence and new beginnings that constantly confronts its negative: a world of totality, destruction and catastrophe. Thinking from the island, from the possibility of other forms of life, becomes a way to resist the supposedly inevitable logic of armament and to question why the world should once again accept war as its dominant horizon.

Act II: Fragmented Nations shifted the focus from environment and memory, from violence and media, to sovereignty and its breakdown. Installed at the Museum of the Unification of Italy in early 2025, during ART CITY, it took the institution’s collection as a stage set against which to project contemporary time-based works on Ukraine, Gaza and other theatres of conflict by Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi, Marco Brambilla, Rashid Masharawi, Sasha Kurmaz, Shadi Habib Allah and Younès Ben Slimane: from Revkovskyi and Rachynskyi’s Civilians. Invasion (2023), which assembles civilian and military videos of the Russian invasion of Ukraine into a single counter-archive that restores the memory of war crimes and the humanitarian crisis, to Limit of Control (Prompted) (2024) by Marco Brambilla, an AI-processed montage of Hollywood and news footage of civil unrest; from the collective film From Ground Zero (2024) coordinated by Rashid Masharawi, which gives voice to young filmmakers in Gaza, to State of Emergency (2018) by Sasha Kurmaz, a four-channel personal and found footage collage of Ukraine’s post-2014 crises; from 30KG Shine (2017) by Shadi Habib Allah, with its nocturnal tunnels under Jerusalem, ghost stories and colonial claims to land, to We knew how beautiful they were, these islands (2022) by Younes Ben Slimane, which follows the quiet rituals of recovering objects and their burial next to the bodies of migrants drowned at sea, on the European strip of land that juts out towards Africa. Our curatorial direction for the exhibition was based on the Italian Institute for International Political Studies’ dossier The World in 2024: The Great Fragmentation, which describes a world characterised by geopolitical tensions, economic instability and the erosion of multilateral frameworks. In 2025, this scenario appears not only confirmed, but further radicalised: fragmentation is translating into an increasingly pronounced crisis of international balances and alliances, allowing a logic of power to emerge in which even the violent redefinition of spheres of influence becomes the organising principle of global relations. By juxtaposing rifles and flags from the nineteenth century with contemporary video works, the show proposed fragmentation as both geopolitical condition and existential reality.

Many of the source accounts of Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi’s Civilians. Invasion, for instance, have gone silent; their creators’ fates are unknown. The work operates both as an artwork and as a counter-archive, preserving fragile evidence that could otherwise slip from proprietary platforms or be buried under the algorithmic churn. Other works in the exhibition dealt with the mediation of warfare through surveillance technology, the role of the Global South in reshaping international alignments and the persistence of neo-colonial impulses under new guises. The museum itself became a device: a space in which the celebration of national unification is displayed while, simultaneously, the very idea of the nation as a unified political subject is eroded by the economic, military and symbolic dynamics that govern the current reorganisation of global power.

Act III: Exploded Views takes place on the page. It gathers essays that were all commissioned specifically for this book after the second exhibition was finished, and that orbit the concerns of the series: philosophical reflections on war and history, analyses of political speech, investigations into cultural reception in altered contexts, case studies in dance and conflict, meditations on bombs and their sounds, diagnoses of culture wars and systemic necropolises, proposals for open curatorial constellations, and art-historical accounts of war in modern painting.

At the same time, it refuses to be a closure. A third act suggests completion, but the conditions that motivated On Dropping Bomb*shells are far from resolved. If the series continues, it will have to respond to new bombshells, new theatres of justification, new forms of fragmentation. If it does not, the insistence on exploded views will need to be carried elsewhere, into other curatorial, editorial and pedagogical settings.

War after the end of history

The project of On Dropping Bomb*Shells has unfolded in the long shadow of a promise that never quite held: the idea, popular in the 1990s, that history had ended and that large-scale ideological conflict would fade into the background. The persistence and proliferation of wars since then have not simply refuted that claim. They have revealed something more unsettling: a world in which conflict continues, yet without the sense that it opens onto clear alternatives or different futures.

What is often described as the "return" of war to Europe and its neighbours risks obscuring how little war ever disappeared, and how unevenly its burdens have been distributed. The language of return also implies that conflict might restore historical meaning, reintroducing a grand narrative of struggle after a period of complacency. Instead, we are confronted with conflicts that reopen no historical horizon, but impose themselves as manifestations of a will to power devoid of any shared political project: instruments of domination and coercion used to manage crises, consolidate spheres of influence and redefine relations of force within a geopolitical landscape increasingly reduced to competition among a few superpowers. In this sense, war does not function as a motor of transformation, but as an authoritarian accelerator of imposed, rapid and unilateral arrangements, withdrawn from any form of collective deliberation.

For Exploded Views, this matters because it shifts the focus from war as a series of decisive events to war as a chronic condition, embedded in infrastructures, media and everyday life. Wars have never, in themselves, guaranteed historical meaning: whatever sense is attached to them is produced by those who hold the power to narrate, justify and normalise violence. The question then becomes how narratives, images and practices make war appear meaningful or inevitable, and how the feeling that "history is happening" is manufactured in situations where viable alternatives are kept remote. The exhibitions and this book approach these questions by multiplying viewpoints, each attentive to a different facet of the apparatus that surrounds contemporary conflict.

Constellations of war: exploded views

Rather than presenting a linear argument or a comprehensive theory, Exploded Views proposes a series of thematic constellations. These constellations draw together concerns that have run through the two exhibitions and that reappear, in different registers, in the texts gathered here.

One such constellation turns around the images, rituals and speeches through which states and other powerful actors justify violence. Calls to arms, commemorations, news bulletins and emergency decrees do not simply describe war, they stage it. They calibrate fear and reassurance, distribute grief unevenly, and offer carefully crafted reasons why certain deaths must be accepted. The series has repeatedly returned to these theatres of justification, setting them against other forms of testimony and representation.

Another constellation focuses on the conditions under which art and culture are made when war, censorship or economic precarity are not background but daily reality. Interruptions, displacements, the loss of archives and the fragility of institutions all shape what can be produced, and how. Rather than treating these pressures as external, the project insists on them as part of the work's very material: time, access, safety, the ability to gather in the same room.

A third constellation concerns infrastructures, landscapes and ecologies. Quarries and seascapes, ports and hotels, energy grids and digital platforms all appear in the exhibitions as sites where war leaves long, uneven traces. Here, violence is not a single explosion but a slow process that erodes horizons, rearranges populations and transforms environments into archives of loss.

A fourth constellation points towards the longer histories and genealogies of war in art. Contemporary works do not emerge from nowhere. They both draw on and contest older ways of representing conflict, from heroic painting and monumental sculpture to political cartoons, documentary photography and experimental film.

Finally, a fifth constellation explores the harshness of trauma in theatres of war and the rituals of care that follow. The perspective shifts away from a Western optic, allowing alternative narratives to emerge with a force hitherto unseen. Platforms of reception are expanded, making room for plural and postcolonial perspectives rooted in contexts beyond the West.

These constellations are not chapters but ways of navigating. They overlap, diverge and reconfigure as different readers bring different experiences to them. What they share is a refusal to isolate war in any single domain. Speech, landscape, body, image, public, archive and institution all belong within the same exploded view.

Reading as open constellation

The title Exploded Views is borrowed from technical drawing, where an exploded view pulls apart the components of a machine so that their relations become legible. This book does something similar with the machinery of war's representation. It lays out parts — texts, works, sites, concepts — at a slight distance from one another so that the reader can perceive how they fit, overlap or grind.

The structure of the volume follows the logic of an open constellation. A constellation is not a chain of causality but a pattern perceived in scattered points. Its coherence is real yet contingent. It depends on where one stands and what one chooses to connect. This volume rejects rigid separations between theoretical, historical or art-historical writing, as well as between reflections anchored in specific case studies and contributions operating on a more abstract plane. Disciplines, geographies and languages coexist side by side, calling into question methodological boundaries that, from a curatorial perspective such as ours, cannot be taken as certain or pre-established. The analysis of artworks is intertwined with that of their conditions of production and reception; contexts are examined from multiple angles simultaneously. It is in this intersection of discourses and critical narratives that the possibility of overcoming logics of methodological exclusivity emerges. This is the book’s wager.

By transposing the exhibition experience to the page, Exploded Views invites a diagonal reading. One might start with the more art-historical or curatorial texts, then branch outward into the more speculative contributions, or do the reverse. One might read the book in the order printed, or create thematic circuits: war and speech, war and image, war and dance, war and environment, war and platforms, war and museums. There is no correct path. What matters is that the reader treats the book not as a sealed container of knowledge but as a field of relations in which their own position and choices matter.

Ethics of looking after the bomb*shell

Any project that deals with war images and war speech risks reproducing the very seductions it seeks to analyse. Across its three acts, On Dropping Bomb*shells has attempted to respond to this dilemma through a set of practical decisions more than through declarations of intent. The exhibitions and this book privilege slowness over shock: extended durations, repetition, careful contextualisation. Works like Mònito – Monition – Mort Nucleàire and Deep Breath do not show explosions, they stretch and submerge them. Civilians. Invasion insists on the cost of looking, on the weight of each frame and each statistic. The curatorial and editorial choices foreground situated knowledge: particular communities, specific sites, concrete histories. They reject regimes of abstraction that render war legible as a geopolitical necessity, concealing its real motivations and neutralising its material and human costs.

At the same time, the project acknowledges its own limits. No exhibition or book can resolve the ethical problems of representing violence. What it can do is make certain mechanisms legible: the genres of speech that turn aggression into necessity, the infrastructures that govern the unequal circulation of images; the rituals that keep memory alive under conditions of repression; the ideological, economic and technological systems that render some lives grievable and others invisible; and the practices of resistance of those who live through war and endure it.

Whether Exploded Views proves to be the final act of On Dropping Bomb*shells or a platform toward further work remains open. The conditions it addresses are unlikely to vanish or resolve. New bombshells, literal and metaphorical, will be dropped. The modest wager of this book is that, by pulling apart the apparatus that surrounds them, by attending to its components and their histories, we may become slightly less vulnerable to its ambiguous allure. To see the exploded view is not yet to disarm the device, but it is a step away from taking its operation for granted.