Daniele Franzella's 'Anabasi' at Palermo's Casa del Mutilato

At the Casa del Mutilato in Palermo, a rationalist fascist-era building inaugurated in 1939, artist Daniele Franzella presents 'Anabasi,' the second exhibition in the cycle 'Il Sospetto' curated by Helga Marsala and Sergio Alessandro. The show confronts the building's loaded history as a monument to Italian war casualties, featuring a self-moving sculpture of black sandbags forming a bunker, two megaphones playing manipulated audio—including a non-marchable 7/8 march, cut-up speeches by Tito and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Mussolini's war declaration, and a nonsensical heroic anthem—plus a cabinet of original photographs from the now-defunct Ospedale dei Mutilati, a wallpaper repeating 'Resistere' with semantic shifts like 'Desistere' and 'Insistere,' prosthetic sculptures, and three small video projections. Franzella describes his intervention as 'anesthetic.' The exhibition runs at Casa del Mutilato, Palermo, with a talk 'Il racconto del potere' scheduled for January 22 at Museo Riso.