Leaflet against the Olympics 2006

Distributed this evening during the opening ceremony of ‘Atrium’ the celebretive structure of the next winter Olympic Games in Turin 2006.

ATRIUM – THE EMPTYNESS BEYOND EXPLOITATION When the emperors must get their subjects to swallow something disastrous, they organise majestic games. That is what is happening now: our governors, right and left together (divided only by the division of the funding), are trying to pass off the Olympics of 2006 (like the High Speed train and the metro) as a beautiful and good occasion for us subjects. It’s not like that, of course, and so they are trying to blind us with lights and ribbons, dwarfs and ballet dancers, splendid constructions behind which there is nothing but speculation. Devastation, cement, expropriation, waste, social control. Panem et circenses. Two weeks of olympic games cannot justify the ruin that is happening both in the valleys (where at the next flood there will cry scandal for the latest concreting that facilitates ‘natural tragedies’)and here in the city. They have built this Atrium, millionaire eyesore right in the city centre. A punch in the eye in an historic centre already devoid of all inhabitants without high incomes but full of banks, cameras, barracks and offices. The last two editions of the winter Olympics were nothing but occasions for doping,gigantic combines and corruption, culminating in mass arrests. Our candidature is, thanks to the intervention of the Agnelli family,good for leaving the city in tatters after taking millions from the State. Build pharaonic works everywhere to blind people, which like all the imperial works that we pay for will end up badly: see Italy ’61, Experimenta, the Alpine stadium of Italy ’90, the Valsusa motorway.