"Civil Atrocities" is a cautionary wake-up call about man’s inhumanity to man and our planet. This photography series was created with children’s toy soldiers and dolls rooted in imaginative play, where toys were often stand-ins for a child’s simplistic view of right and wrong, good and evil. As an adult living through the compounded horrors of a powerful embracing of fascism, terrorism, climate crisis, and global pandemic, my work represents the destruction, chaos, and fear that threatens my survival and destroys any comfort in imagining a future.
Review by URBANAUTICA
Who hasn’t played with guns as a child? The toy soldiers with whom to stage real battles. These military figurines have a distant origin. They date back to the late Middle Ages. The early ones refer to the playful use of pilgrims’ emblems. Their use as toys for children had a vigorous development over the centuries, passing through different materials and handcrafted finishes. Some creations are now considered works of art. The advent of plastic eventually contributed to their mass diffusion. They are the precursors of the “Toy Story” made famous by cartoons, up to video games. In addition to guns, pirate sabers, Indian disguises, cowboys. But what does all this tell us? War is not just the raw material of school textbooks. Isn’t history just made up of battle dates to remember? Are we surrounded by monuments, mausoleums, signs of an ever-present and never resolved conflict? War in the West is a recurring film. Heroes are soldiers. This is a great tragedy. The prevailing narrative since epic poems tells us about it—an inescapable fate. Homer’s poem, Iliad, is no less gory than the images that run through the Internet. This burden weighs on human nature as in no other animal species. Amy Bassin creates a moving scenography of all this. I like to think that each image is like a piece of a puzzle. Together with the others forms a more significant figure—a sort of digital mosaic, another “Guernica” that depicts the atrocity of the human being. A carnage of polymers mixed in a liquid bath of blood and colors prevents us from looking to the future. Will there ever be an end to this? Or should we wait for the sunset of the West, which has capitalized on the spirit of founding warfare more than other civilizations?
