This book revolves around the cycle Topography of Terror, initiated by artists Elisa Caldana and Diego Tonus in 2017, and presents the making-of process behind Topography of Terror (19.12.2016) and Never Again, the first two episodes of the cycle.
The two films involved the CGI making of the never-realized building Topographie des Terrors, in Berlin, by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, and research on the role and effects of violent imagery in terrorism spreading through news, social media, and the nonplaces of the Internet. The publication comprises images and research related to the making of the works, and it brings together written contributions from different authors instigated by the films and their main themes, such as post-truth and journalistic storytelling, among others, taken as a starting point for further reflection. The artists intend Topography of Terror as an open-ended cycle. Its conceptual center will produce, over time, a series of new works expanding on the idea of mental images and repetition, taking into consideration the nature and forms of contemporary terror that are part of recurrent historical processes and an eternal return of violence.
Elisa Caldana (born 1986 in Pordenone, Italy) is an artist working primarily with sculpture, performance, film, and writing. Her works are united conceptually by the use of abstraction and imagination to draw attention to political and social issues, analysing the paradoxes and liminal spaces that generate from the coexistence of plural standpoints. Architecture, public spaces, monuments, and collective identity are recurrent themes within her work.
Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus (born 1984 in Italy, lives and works in The Hague, NL) focuses on reproduction as a tool of investigation to question control systems and power structures by transforming images, objects and collective experiences he selects, in order to put them in a new process of thought and present their underlying structures of codification and normativity. Either working with video or journalistic writing (whereby editing allows the re-telling of an individual experience by altering it), voice (wherein precise pitch and modulation techniques influence listener's unconscious reaction), performance or sculpture (wherewith a specific subject and its history are questioned through the presentation of their new originals), the research of Diego Tonus analyses the balance between narrative's modes and the content, showing or revealing how much narrative structure is, above all, an instrument of influencing and manipulation of both the public and the object.
