Last year, during the International Journalism Festival of Perugia, the Italian Coalition for Civil Rights and Freedom (CILD) organized some panels on privacy, mass surveillance and the role of whistleblowers.

On that occasion, we had the pleasure of meeting Italian artist Davide Dormino, who introduced us to his bronze sculpture dedicated to Assange, Snowden and Manning. It features the famous whistleblowers standing on three chairs and a fourth, empty chair meant as a platform for public speaking.

Contemporary heroes

The artwork is called "Anything to Say" and has been traveling around major European cities, including Berlin, Geneva, Strasbourg and Paris, for some months now. We asked Davide a few questions to get to know more about the meaning of his traveling monument.

Q: Why did you focus on the thematic of whistleblowers? Where does the idea come from?
A: The project started with a friend of mine, Charles Glass. He is an American journalist and he basically spent his life working around the world to protect freedom of information. This is indeed another value of the artwork: it is important to know the truth, it is important to be courageous about what happens around the world.

Charles and I started to talk about the opportunity to do something about the courage of these three figures - that is, Assange, Manning and Snowden - and we just decided to start with this project, to do a crowdfunding and find a way to show this to the world.

Q: Let's start with the "corpus" of your artwork - why did you pick bronze and not another material?
A: When I started to think about the project, I immediately decided that the most important thing to do was to send a very clear and precise message to the public. For this reason I chose a very ancient and traditional way to portray these three figures.

Ultimately for me the most important thing was to be clear: what you see is what it is. There are three figures standing on three chairs with an empty chair close to them and when people stay in front of the sculpture, they immediately understand that they have to stand up on the chair.

The other important part of this artwork is to inform people, so usually we have a panel with all the information about Assange, Manning and Snowden. In fact, a lot of people still don't know them and we have to inform them. I chose them because they are three contemporary heroes: this means that they are still alive and we have to protect them - because they are telling us the truth and the truth is a fundamental component of our liberty. Only by knowing the truth we can ascertain what's right and what's wrong.

'Courage is contagious'

Q: Why did you choose a chair as symbol?
A: The empty chair is the most important part of the artwork, because it is something like a question. People who stand up on the chair have the opportunity to ask themselves why they want to do so. The great power of art is indeed the ability to push people, through their participation in an artwork, to ask or understand something about their life.

Also, a chair represents something very comfortable and being comfortable usually means staying still. My idea was instead of an act: to stand up on the chair, to watch behind the wall and see something different, something that people want to hide.

Do you remember the Dead Poets Society movie with Robin Williams? He was a teacher and he jumped on a table, calling out to his students: 'Please, come here, stand up on the table and change your point of view.' For me what is important is precisely to change our point of view, to move ourselves far from our comfort zone. Assange, Manning and Snowden left their comfort zones to say the truth and they are now paying a very hard price for that.

Q: Does your work try to mobilize people?
A: We have the opportunity to accept or not what the government does to us. There is a problem of mass surveillance, which is very hard to tackle because people are afraid of exposing themselves. Nevertheless, every historical period has its heroes or great revolutionaries, people who are able to change the world. I believe that art has to take the responsibility to narrate the world, and indeed I started this because I felt in my gut that I had to do something for others.

Q: What do you mean when you say that courage is contagious?
A: That is something that Assange said, and I re-adapted to "be courageous, because courage is contagious." I really do believe in this, and indeed in the viral ability of my artwork.

A longer version of this interview is available here.