Physics defines “thermal chaos” as the coexistence within a body of different temperature levels, which give rise to spontaneous movements that are potentially disorderly and tumultuous. If we read this notion metaphorically, it is easy to trace references to various political situations currently simmering along the shores of the Mediterranean basin. On a planetary level, an analysis of the Earth’s condition reveals a disheartening scenario, where all natural elements of the biosphere exhibit signs of turmoil affecting every component of the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. We now stand helpless before climate change, which causes irreversible disasters at all latitudes; tectonic shifts that disrupt entire regions; wars exported to the planet’s marginal zones; and the exodus of entire populations from the Global South toward richer lands, far from hunger. It is urgent to identify more sustainable forms of thermal exchange that allow for the attainment of more stable equilibria and reduce the disparities between hunger and opulence, democracies and totalitarianisms. Artists have always functioned as thermometers, detecting temperatures in all parts of the social body. Frequently, in the work of artists, elements of criticism, discomfort, suffering, and intolerance emerge—reactions to a barbarized context that dramatically undermines the rules and values of civil coexistence. Here we have gathered a significant sample of works that, in various forms, raise a protest sign against a system that, for too long, has failed in managing individual relationships, in promising personal growth, and in guaranteeing freedom and the universal right to imagine a better world for all.

As a “calling card” for the exhibition, or as a historical and philosophical reference, the entrance of Casa Masaccio features an old film by Guy Debord conceived in 1967 and produced in 1973. A manifesto of the Situationist Movement, La Société du Spectacle is indeed a prophetic work that, in early 2011, remains disarmingly relevant.

Christian Niccoli and Massimiliano and Gianluca De Serio then lead us into the contemporary linguistic Babel, where the ability to understand the reasoning of the other is challenged by an impersonal communicative model, in which individual traumas are no longer acknowledged or shared by the community. Dehumanized and cold is also the research by Gabriele Pesci, who, rummaging through the interstices of the Web, gathers cynical testimonies from military campaigns conducted by Western superpowers in the Middle East. The two works by Enzo Umbaca—one from 1994, the other from 2009—act as warning bells, foretelling what we are now forced to confront on political and social levels. Stefano Lupatini and Stefano Collizzolli reflect on the fragile borderlines that separate cultures, nationalities, and powers. The tragedy of the thousands of workplace deaths that each year stain construction sites, both at home and abroad, is documented by the De Serio brothers and the collective NoiSeGrUp. Meanwhile, the horrors of crime news—stories to which we are sadly desensitized and anesthetized—are problematically re-presented in the works of Oliver Pietsch and Silvia Levenson and Florencia Martinez. Gea Casolaro develops a reflection on the pointless and cruel characteristics of the prison condition, which proves entirely ineffective in terms of societal reintegration. Benjamin Lee Gordon and Ciro Vitale present works focused on the dimension of time and on socio-cultural changes. The collective Alterazioni Video, with their biting irony, denounces the real estate speculation and the hundreds of unfinished buildings in southern Italy.

In the selected works, we never encounter a simplistically journalistic approach; each artist has made the effort to interpret, through their own language and sensibility, the events and news they sought to share. Caos termici was not conceived as a sorrowful list of grievances, but as an urgent call to respond—each in their own way, yet united in the will to express discomfort and opposition to a system that must no longer have a future.

With the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo and Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lombardia