Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition [2025]

C/O Berlin Award 2026

Text by Rocco Venzia

Press Release by Fonderia 20.9

Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition examines the body as a political field shaped through institutional images and state pedagogy. Working with a state-issued military and civil defence textbook once distributed to Iranian high school students, the project traces how bodies are trained to become legible, obedient, and operational. Introduced to students at around fifteen, the manual’s staged photographs and diagrams teach how to stand, aim, rescue, and respond to a threat. In this context, the body is represented but produced as a disciplined subject, where readiness becomes a form of citizenship and physical comportment becomes a form of ideology.

The work intervenes in the textbook on two levels. First, I reproduce selected pages and annotate them with corrections, darkroom notes, and handwritten markings, imagining the material at an earlier stage of its life, before it entered the classroom. These interventions shift the language of instruction into a clinical register, highlighting how institutional power operates through procedures that resemble care. The body appears as something to be measured, corrected, stabilised, and made compliant. In this way, the textbook becomes an archive of body politics, revealing how governance moves through visibility, repetition, and normalisation.

The second component reenacts poses from the manual with my own body and translates them into three-dimensional scans. By restaging these two-dimensional images as volumetric records, I make visible what the original photographs suppress: weight, strain, micro adjustments, and the vulnerability of flesh within an idealised diagram. The scans expose the gap between institutional representation and lived embodiment, turning the manual’s figures into fragile, imperfect bodies that resist complete alignment.

Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition reflects on how institutions script bodies and how lens-based media can reveal the mechanisms that produce compliance. Situated within the present moment of overlapping crises, the project treats the body as an archive of instruction and experience, and asks what it means to take the diagram seriously enough to question, refuse, and re-inhabit it.