Pakistani policeman shooting a tear gas grenade, Rawalpindi, 2001

That war and politics are not only a media spectacle could be seen in Somalia, where the American marines disembarked before the CNN cameras to later abandon the country rushedly after the dramatic episode that Ridley Scott would recreate in Black Hawk Down. The Afghan war itself, the first one of the new era opened by 9/11, could have been fought only with invisible fighters and bombers – the F-117 Stealth and B-2 Spirit that so well represent the folds and warps of the aesthetic of the nineties – and with the unmanned Predator, but in the end the war was won with AC-130 Spectre gunships, simple Hercules with artillery, and the old B-52’s, the Boeing bombers designed half a century ago and still in use. In this transit from spirits to specters it is worth mentioning that the B-2 (first used in the Balkan wars and their ‘urbicides’) and the Guggenheim of Bilbao (an effective tool to regenerate a city) were both designed with the CATIA program; an optimistic reflection on technology that may give hope in a crisis whose violent and random disorder threatens to shatter the frozen fiction of political elites: so that on our future landscapes we will never need to write the epitaph of the red blackboard of Chernobyl, “it’s all over”...[+]