Fragile Power departs from a restoration scenario: the original bronze bell of the former House of the Fascist Party in Predappio — birthplace of Benito Mussolini — is removed from its tower and replaced with a precision replica crafted entirely from crystal glass. The original electromagnetic striking mechanism, intact since the 1930s, is restored and reattached. A remote activation system, housed in a custom leather briefcase, is handed over to political leadership at the building’s ceremonial reopening. The work operates within the affirmative, celebratory language of institutional heritage promotion, presenting the completed installation without interpreting its consequences.
The glass bell condenses several overlapping references. Crystal glass — more rigid, more resonant, and more fragile than bronze — is commissioned from a leading Austrian manufacturer, an allusion to Swarovski, a company whose wartime history of Nazi complicity and forced labour has long been refracted through decades of glamour and spectacle. The briefcase’s all-over pattern of Italian flags echoes the visual logic of logomania while invoking the scenographic language of Italian Fascist architecture. Glamour, here, is not decoration but method — a mode of concealment that the work inhabits in order to expose.
Fragile Power asks what political power will do when handed an instrument whose activation guarantees its own destruction. The question is left open, its possible answers embedded in the site, its history, and the present.
Fragile Power was commissioned by the Co.Co.War. Dissonant Heritage and War. Conservation and Communication of a Difficult Legacy – a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The work was presented at the Co.Co.War Final Conference and Exhibition, Castello del Valentino, Turin, February 2026.
