Nomadismo e guerriglia: l’Igloo di Giap di Mario Merz
Denis Viva
Being a symbol of Arte Povera’s engagement during 1968, Mario Merz’s Igloo di Giap was often discussed
as one of the most blatant reference to the guerrilla and the Vietnam War. But how did the Third-worldist
theories or the Italian students’ protests inspire Merz in combining an Eskimo architecture and a sentence
of the vietnamese general Giap? Was the Leftist anti-Americanism the only reason which brought him to
adopt the igloo? This article tries to delve into the political context of Italy around March 1968, when the
Igloo di Giap was firstly showed, a week after the clash between students and police at valle Giulia in Rome. Involving the reception of Giap’s sentence, the scientific notions about the igloo, or the vision of the Eskimo in Italy, this study aims at presenting the problematic message of the Igloo di Giap.