Presented at: Performing, Catanzaro (IT), 2026; Amanda run-art-space, Genova (IT) 2025; Serbelloni 119A, Roma (IT), 2025;
Lazy patriots is a lecture performance that engages with the works presented in the exhibition of the same name, held in 2023 at the SUPPAMoC’ Foundation in Terni. In the introductory text curated by the founders, Chiara Moccetti and Edoardo Suppa, we read: “Here there is no guide other than experience; yet, since no experience can fully encompass reality, it is unwise to rely on it entirely.” Taking up the Foundation’s invitation, since 2025 committed to a traveling conference program aimed at disseminating the exhibition across the country, the performance offers an expanded exploration of the works. During the event, screenings, commentaries, and archival materials alternate, integrating the presentation with previously unpublished contributions. The format, conceived in collaboration with the participating artists, allows each speaker to reinterpret Lazy patriots from an autonomous perspective, giving rise to an ever-evolving cycle of lectures.
To see all the works by the artists on display, browse through the Pigri di Patria booklet.
Performance at Amanda run-art-space, Genova, 2025
The true story behind the Pigri di Patria exhibition:
The lecture performance, however, rests on a crucial and secret premise: the exhibition of the same name never actually existed, nor did the Foundation, the curators, the artists, or their works. Everything shown to the public is the result of research conducted between 2024 and 2025, participating in Italian army military events, the Frecce Tricolori AirShows, collecting interviews, reworking archives, and much more.
Only afterward, using the collected material, was the fictitious exhibition organized, inventing works, biographies, correlations and everything necessary to make the entire narrative plausible.
To glimpse the intentions behind such an operation, one might decontextualize and borrow a statement by Peter Sloterdijk: “Without an industry of destruction, not even that of distraction could exist.” And conversely, one might add. In this regard, between the rhetoric of destruction and distraction, the lecture performance unfolds on the threshold between reality and fiction.
If military propaganda sweetens its destructive mission by filling the narrative with heroism, entertainment, security and innovation, then the counter-history of Pigri di Patria similarly adopts lies and falsification of reality to undermine the linearity of discourse. In this sense, it is a parafictional lecture performance that repeatedly calls the audience to renegotiate their own credulity/incredulity, in a process that is simultaneously an individual experience and a social production of reality.
As the works of the imaginary artists, different in style and biography, are presented, the role of mere narrator is progressively abandoned and, through grotesque disguises and satirical detours, the audience is invited to engage with the infinite strategies of discourse manipulation.