Toy soldiers

The motive shows two identical groups of toy soldiers. One group is painted in red shades the other one in blue shades. The groups face each other for battle but are painted in a way that they cannot see each other. This is done by painting the two groups on a corner of a wall or wrapping the ends of the rifles of the lying soldier around a shared wall (container). The idea to paint these two groups came from a famous quote by Lyndon B. Johnson:

‘War is always the same’.

Lately, the quote has been altered slightly to sell a popular video game (‘war never changes’). But the quote goes on ‘(…) It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate (…)’. It is easy to listen to propaganda and divide the world into “black” and “white”, “good” and “evil”, “them” and “us”. But we are all the same. Real people whose luck decided where they were born and which propaganda is played to them, accepting the hate to destroy the enemy without ever seeing him.

It is in an old WWII ruin near the city