KOSSIGA BOIA

Title: KOSSIGA BOIA

Photographer(s): Alfredo Polichetti

Writer(s): Anna Maria Cossiga,Francesco Cossiga, Vincemzo Mazzarella

Designer(s):

Publisher(s): Monserrato Arte, Roma, Italy

Year: 2006

Print run:

Language(s): Italian

Pages: 46

Size: 21 x 30 cm

Binding: Softcover

Edition:

Print: Printed in Italy

Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Italy, 2006

ISBN:

It was Alfredo Polichetti, a Digos italian agent, who took the photos on display at the Monserrato gallery. He did so at the behest of the then tenant of the Viminale, the feared and attacked Francesco Cossiga, who would later become President of the Republic in 1985. It was his daughter Anna Maria, rummaging through her father's papers, who found the images and thought of making an exhibition of them. Thus the Kossiga Boia initiative was born.

Rivers of ink were spilled on the walls of Rome in those years, from the suburbs to the city centre. Kossiga - with a K and the runic ss - still pours forth, in search of a truth that is unlikely to be the same for either side. But rivers of paint were also poured, in those years, testimonies written on the city walls, from the right or the left, it matters little, modern epigraphs that wittily and imaginatively stigmatise the 'Enemy', him, the Minister of the Interior, 'Kossiga the Hangman' but 'zuzzurellone' too.

It was called 'historical documentation'. Cossiga regretted not seeing a photo of an inscription against him on the Berlin Wall on display. And it is again he who urges a reflection on those years. "If you think that many people died or lost their freedom to write them or, to obey them, killed, you understand that it was not an adventure of history, but the tragedy of a country, on which very little has been meditated".