The words finally sounded better than the usual whitewashed political bullshit.
I was sitting in my mountain workshop in Carrara, covered in marble dust, listening to the radio, and I thought:
“Well, let’s see how long that hope will last before someone lights the fuse again and the American dream sends itself off on another bad trip.”
That’s how Stars and Spikes was born. A Mustang, the American horse of freedom, not cast in fine Detroit steel and chrome, but carved in marble, heavy, massive and cold.
Its body carries the red and white stripes of the flag like a costume that no longer fits. The mane, a blue Mohawk, stands sharp and defiant, a punk refusing to salute.
And instead of hooves, it rolls on four bright blue aluminium wheels, polished, proud, the symbol of motion and horsepower turned into a fetish of chrome.On its back it balances an oval shape, carved from fine alabaster. Soft, translucent, almost breathing.
An egg, fragile, full of promise. Good future!
On the side I engraved the Obama emblem, that rising sun of optimism, the clean geometry of a political miracle.
Yes we can!
The well formed egg stands for what people wanted to believe in back then, myself included: peace, equality, anti-racism, decency, intelligence, Star Trek, all that delicate human stuff that rarely survives contact with reality.
And yet, right there at the horse’s ass, there’s a small detail that changes everything: a little red stick of dynamite.
The fuse is already burning.
That’s the real engine of this sculpture. It’s not the wheels that drive it, it’s the fuse.
Because America, for all its beauty, generosity and culture, always carries its own explosion inside. It’s a country addicted to ignition: to adrenaline, to violence, to the thrill of destruction that always follows a dream.They simply can’t help it.
The alabaster egg, of course, didn’t survive the ride. It shattered into a thousand pieces, already during Barack’s presidency. It was pure, it glowed from within, but it was and remains only a fragile idea.
It sat on a strong back that trembles, a nation that always wants to run but never knows where, that mistakes the sound of speed for the feeling of progress.
When I finished the piece, I didn’t think it was cynical. It was just honest.
The Obama movement was a small miracle, and underneath it the Mustang, painted with pride, rolling straight toward its own explosion.
Seventeen years later, I look at it again, and it feels almost prophetic.The fuse never really went out. The bomb has gone off.
The still United States are galloping, high and blind, into an uncertain time, in robber-baron capitalism and alternative facts. Maybe that’s America: a country that keeps blowing itself up just to prove it’s still alive.
And maybe we’re all like that, once we start believing our own slogans.
Good luck, my dear Americans, and may whatever god there is help the rest of us survive your ride!
Carrara 2008
