BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
You may remember the first two parts of a public art installation we covered five years ago called “Apocalypse Trilogy” Begins in Milan : Biancoshock & Francesco Garbelli Skewer Fast Food and Industrial Farming“. Today we bring you the third and final installation.
Back in 2021, Milan street artists Biancoshock and Francesco Garbelli introduced the first two chapters of their Apocalypse Trilogy, a mordant and diminuitive exercise in flowers, corporate logic, and the reassuring language that can make almost anything sound socially responsible.
The flowers were the innocent parties. In Super Size Flowers, they had become grotesquely overfed specimens in a public green space, courtesy of an imaginary fast-food benefactor. In Engulf & Devour, hundreds were crowded into cages, borrowing the visual logic of intensive farming. And hovering helpfully nearby in both cases was the corporate sponsor, taking credit for addressing the very predicament it appeared to embody.
Apparently the corporation has diversified. Five years later, the artists return to finish the trilogy with Omnia Global Defense in Milan.
Omnia is imagined as a multinational holding company with one arm devoted to weapons and another to pharmaceutical research – it is not as strange a combination today as you may think. One develops increasingly efficient means of destroying human bodies; the other searches for increasingly sophisticated means of preserving them. It sounds like a contradiction until you remove morality from the organizational chart. Then it looks remarkably efficient.
That may be the sharper joke in this final chapter. Garbelli and Biancoshock aren’t proposing some shadowy conspiracy joining medicine and armaments. They don’t need to. Instead, they point to the almost frictionless capacity of contemporary corporate structures to contain mutually opposing activities beneath one respectable roof. What would be an ethical contradiction for an individual becomes diversification when presented in a financial report.
And once again, the flowers get the worst of it.
This time they resemble cultivated laboratory specimens, separated from the surrounding park beneath transparent domes. They are safe, theoretically. They are also inaccessible. The gesture of preservation begins to resemble quarantine, display, possession—or perhaps all three.
That distinction has become increasingly familiar, and the artists look through the clear plastic to better understand. Nature is packaged as something to defend, restore, offset, certify, and sustainably manage, often by institutions whose other activities may exhaust it. The language is solicitous. The enclosure remains.
This is where the fictional corporate sponsorship running through the trilogy earns its keep. The sign beside the artwork is not simply an explanatory label; it is part of the work’s comedy. The benefactor always arrives immaculate, professionally named and apparently pleased with itself. The flowers, meanwhile, keep adapting to whatever fresh indignity has been devised for them.
In 2021 they became fat and overcrowded. In 2026 they are chemically assisted and safely placed beneath glass.
Progress.
For a trilogy calling itself Apocalypse, there are refreshingly few flames, floods or cinematic ruins here. Biancoshock and Garbelli locate their catastrophe somewhere quieter: in the steady normalization of systems that alter the natural world and then congratulate themselves for managing the consequences.
Omnia even supplies the appropriately frictionless corporate assurance:
“One Force, One Future.”
You might reasonably ask, “Whose?”
In 2021, Biancoshock & Francesco Garbelli presented the first two installations of Apocalypse Trilogy; we wrote about Apocalypse Trilogy #1 & #2 here on BSA. Click HERE to read about installations #1 & #2.
