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Geneva has been hosting a new exhibition of anti-nuclear art by the Italian artist and activist Enrico Muratore – known professionally as EMA - with the support of ICAN. The project began as a series of paintings and has grown into a multimedia project with a book, song, video and live readings.
The project is called Promemoria: Sending out an SOS. Promemoria means reminder in Italian. The exhibition has been hosted by ICAM (Institut des Cultures Arabes et Mediterraneennes) in Geneva with the support of ICAN and the organisation Colorier L’Avenir.
It consists of a selection of paintings from Promemoria and there have also been live readings from the EMA’s fable from the book of Promomoria that was inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984.
Hiroshima Farm by EMA
The exhibition was officially opened by the Deputy Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations in Geneva, Christoph Wieland, and the Executive Director of ICAN, Melissa Parke, both of whom underlined the importance of art in raising public awareness of the existential threat the world faces from nuclear weapons and in galvanising people by appealing to their empathy for their fellow humans.
Christoph Wieland, Enrico Muratore and Melissa Parke
The background to the exhibition is that 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the first nuclear bomb explosion in New Mexico shortly before. The two nuclear strikes on 6 and 9 August 1945 killed 140,000 people instantly and at least 70,000 more in the months that followed. Most were civilians.
The message of ICAN’s work this year has been that eighty years of harm from nuclear weapons is enough and the exhibition echoes this. There are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world that continue to threaten our existence. They must be eliminated before they eliminate us.
Artists have a significant role to play in raising public consciousness of the dangers we face and in mobilising action to protect and save our world because their work resonates in ways the written and spoken word cannot.
Melissa Parke contributed the foreword to the Promemoria Book in which she said: “EMA’s art is a powerful exploration of the threats our species has managed to produce both to its own future and the future of every living thing on the planet. The works in this book are inspired by EMA’s own experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of climate change and the effect of conflict on human rights, as well as the poetry and children’s literature of Gianni Rodari and the work of other writers, most notably George Orwell’s Animal Farm”.
If you are in Geneva you can catch the exhibition until 14 December at ICAM, Rue de Fribourg 5, 1201, Geneva.
The book Promemoria is available here.