Friedl’s Stew of Imperial Modernity

The best piece is again found in the German section. Where the old posters hang is an (“anonymous”) one portraying Hitler and Co. at the dinner table with a huge pot in front of them. The mood is cheerful and comforting, the food evidently Spartan. Written on two lines diagonally across the entire image: “Am Sonntag mit dem Führer Eintopf!” (On Sunday, stew with the Führer!).

– Peter Friedl ‘Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45’ (1996), in ‘Peter Friedl Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981-2009, Sternberg Press: Berlin, 2010), p. 105.

In Lo specchio di Diana (1996), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi recall the genealogy of imperial fantasies. On 20 October 1927, Mussolini gives the order to drain Lake Nemi to salvage the remains of two magnificent ships from Emperor Caligula, reviver of the Diana myth. The following year the first ship is freed from the mud, some time later the second. 21 April 1940: Mussolini returns to open the museum in which the two ships are exhibited. One is also able to see the triumphant Duce in Tripoli in 1926 and poison-gas victims in Ethiopia. In the spring of 1944, the ships and the museum are destroyed by a fire during the German retreat. As in all of their found-footage works since the Comerio appropriation Dal polo all’equatore, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi use historical archive material, deconstructing, coloring, and re-mounting it in a process of cinematic contemplation. Their politics of memory focuses on the problem of viewing and complicity.

– Peter Friedl ‘Secret Modernity’ (2009), in ‘Peter Friedl Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981-2009, Sternberg Press: Berlin, 2010), p. 243.