Luftkrieg is a solo exhibition of Roberto Paci Dalò at the Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin.
The artist creates a dense network of unpublished works, sound objects, interactive installations, drawings, sculptures and films that dialogue deeply with the space that hosts them. The spaces of the Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin thus become a real sensory device in which visitors are immersed.
The main reference for the project is the book Luftkrieg und Literatur (“Natural history of destruction”) by W. G. Sebald. Luftkrieg is a project in collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

The Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin presents the exhibition Luftkrieg, solo exhibition of the artist Roberto Paci Dalò.
The project is inspired by the literary work of W. G. Sebald of 2001, Luftkrieg und Literatur, a painful study on the devastation of German cities after the Allied bombardments of the in World War II.
The book, the author’s last work before his death, is also a controversial meditation on the trauma of the oblivion of war in German literature and culture. Paci Dalò investigates some of the aspects of the text through sound, objects, film, light and reflects on deep concepts such as suffering, amnesia, war, society.

The vernissage, on Friday, December 7, 2012 at 19.00, involves the contribution of Dr. Julia H. Schröder of the University of Fine Arts Berlin (Universität der Künste), which introduces and moderates the discussion.

Luftkrieg und Literatur

Luftkrieg und Literatur by W. G. Sebald is a bloody chronicle of the Second World War that tells the story of the destruction of 101 German cities after the attacks of the Allies.

Like other works by Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur represents the author’s attempt to reconcile himself – in both personal and literary terms – with the trauma of the Second World War and its effects on the German people.

The work shakes the German conscience and narrates many taboo such as the terrible post-war balance of six hundred thousand dead and seven million displaced for the nation that had started the Second World War. A disastrous historical knot of which, as Paci Dalò argues, “the elaboration required years of work, on the level of collective feeling and political practice”. This is the theoretical starting point from which to start a reflection translated into an original exhibition entitled Luftkrieg.

War and site-specific

Sound art, objects, works, images, light and sound, are arranged like a score suspended between the familiar and the unknown. The theme is that of devastation that lives again, still harmful, within the sensory device of Paci Dalò. Jeff Mann and Damiano Bagli contributed to the realization of some works.

As is the practice of site-specific, Paci Dalò sets up the exhibition in such a way that sound objects, interactive installations, drawings, sculptures and films create a “total” work, in symbiosis with the environment of the Galerie Mario Mzzoli.

As Helga Marsala writes for Artribune: “There are memories of a time that has never been removed and never been solved, in which the dust of bombing, the aesthetics of rubble, the sense of clash and the sad liturgy of war, the swarming of submerged and decadent cities, the sounds of sirens, the screech of rusty metal, the noises of old radios and the voices recorded in the cockpits of military planes mix together at the level of imagination and perception. And in the meantime, History flows, between the pages and the rooms, relative and yet inexorable. Like the time of an interactive device, hidden inside a pendulum clock…”