PRODUCTIONS: AN ALIBI FOR THE VIOLENCE

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Carlo & Lodovico Prola

Ditta Prola

26'

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Violent, aggressive and ruthless, merciless with their prey, angry, combative and always ready to fight. This is how we often define animals, attributing ferocious violence and ruthlessness to them.
But what about us? When we define the human action of killing other humans as beastlike, we are wrong: this is human behaviour because only man kills, tortures and attacks other individuals from its own species. The justification that violence is an inevitable primeval instinct and part of our genetic inheritance, due to our evolutionary link to the animal world, doesn’t hold up at all.
In the animal world intraspecific violence, meaning among individuals of the same species, does exist, but it rarely leads to extreme consequences.
Therefore, we clearly cannot find an explanation for our violent tendencies in the natural world, nor can we find an alibi for individual crimes by looking at animals as our accomplices.
We cannot simply say that war is a pathological event. It was invented and has been used over time to carry out specific functions like defence and conquest of a territory and control over new resources. But war is not the only way to achieve these objectives. We need to explore other means of carrying out the functions of war, if we want peace to prevail.