Cannelloni Bomb

The work titled Cannelloni Bomb is part of a wider project, Civil Defense, carried out by Szymon Kobylarz at the Żak | Branicka gallery in Berlin in 2009. The point of departure was civil defence – a subject introduced to Polish school curricula in 1967, whose syllabus was modified in 1990 in effect of the systemic transformation of the country. In times of the Cold War, such classes in the countries of the Warsaw Pact were focused on military training, civil defence, and first aid, in particular in case of an attack with the use of weapons of mass destruction. The political message conveyed during these courses was also very important.

Kobylarz, however, was more interested in the prosaic aspect of civil defence. In his interpretation, the whole training is like a child’s game of “playing war”. Inspired by lessons about the basics of weapons’ construction and the naive instructions of “what to do in case of” a catastrophe, bomb raids, nuclear or gas attacks, the artist builds a whole arsenal at home. Applying Internet based knowledge and DIY methodology, Kobylarz makes a smoke bomb from a ping-pong ball, a gas mask from Coke bottles, and a bomb from cannelloni. By presenting his creations in display boxes, the artist gives them the status of quasi-museum exhibits – an archaic materialisation of a ludicrous reality. The accompanying drawings, which serve as the narrative to the works, illustrate the method or effects of the use of the different items.

Kobylarz also studies the uncontrolled circulation of knowledge which can be used for projects with dangerous consequences. Numerous versions of different instructions on how to build an explosive, or manuals for eccentric self-taught experimenters, are quite abundant on the Internet. Kobylarz treats them with a grain of salt, at the same time indicating yet another problem, namely science, which is a constituent of all inventions, even the ones made at home. He asks about the status and the ethical aspects of science, as well as the aims which it serves – after all, these aims have rarely anything in common with the noble ideas on which they were formulated.

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