(ANSA) - MILAN, 30 DEC - In the last ten days in Brescia almost all the posters, totems, banners advertising the exhibition 'China is not nearby Badiucao - works by a dissident artist' of which the Chinese embassy in Italy have been damaged, before the opening on 12 November, it had asked the Municipality to cancel it.
Now the Brescia Musei foundation announces that it will file a complaint against unknown persons, and that, in agreement with the artist, it will not remove the damaged materials where the references to where the exhibition takes place have been canceled, with a "symbolic gag on the project".
According to the foundation, the "deliberate and coherent will to cancel" demonstrates the intent to censor the exhibition at the Santa Giulia Museum,already visited by 13 thousand people.
The exhibition, scheduled until February 13, is the first personal dedicated to Badiucao, pseudonym of the Chinese artist-activist known for his protest art, now in exile in Australia and retraces his artistic activity from the debut to the most recent works born in response to the health crisis triggered by the Covid pandemic.
Thanks to his blog, social media and organized communication campaigns, Badiucao carries on his own activity of resistance, one of the very few channels not filtered by government control capable, for example, of broadcasting the tales of Wuhan citizens during the 2020 lockdown.
Precisely in 2020 he was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent by the Human Rights Foundation, intended for artists who creatively denounce the deceptions of dictatorships.
"This type of violent censorship - commented the president of the Brescia Musei Foundation Francesca Bazoli - ironically reinforces the objectives of the Municipality of Brescia and the Brescia Musei Foundation and does not affect the overall results of the project".
"Art in all its forms - underlined the mayor Laura Castelletti - is increasingly an ambassador of the right to speak and free thought, the attempts at censorship at the Badiucao exhibition are the demonstration of how effective and necessary its messages are".
(HANDLE).