A Vatican court on Monday handed down
suspended nine month sentences to two activists from the Ultima
Generazione (UG, Last Generation) group who glued themselves to
the iconic Laocoon statuary group in the Vatican Museums last
August in a protest aimed at raising awareness of the climate
crisis.
The pair, Ester Goffi, 26, and Guido Viero, 61, also received a
1,500 euro fine for aggravated damage and an additional fine of
120 euros for disobeying orders from Vatican officials.
On May 26 the Vatican condemned so-called 'eco-vandalism'
targetting cultural heritage in a document on tourism by Rino
Fisichella, the Pro-prefect for New Evangelization.
The issue is topical as civil-disobedience groups such as
Italy's UG have started to target artworks and monuments in
protests aimed at highlighting the need to tackle the climate
crisis.
UG and its sister groups in other parts of the world say they do
not like staging disruptive and controversial protests, but see
no alternative as decades of efforts to get leaders to stop the
greenhouse-gas emissions that are driving humanity towards
climate breakdown via traditional methods of protest have proved
fruitless.
UG's protests targetting monuments have featured the use of
easy-to-wash-off paint and their 'attacks' on artworks have
tended to regard the protective screens, rather than the works
themselves.
Pope Francis has repeatedly told the international community to
address the climate crisis and recently called for an end to
the "senseless war against creation".
Goffi, one of the pair convicted over the Laocoon statue action,
told ANSA it was "a paradox from a logical point of view" that
she was on trial in the Vatican while the pope complained about
climate inaction.
"We are surprised in a negative way, given what he wrote in his
encyclical about creation, Laudato Si," she said.
"We want this common home to remain for everyone," she said,
adding that May's deadly floods in Emilia Romagna and other
recent climate-linked disasters showed how bad things are
getting.
Three UG members are currently on trial in Rome for spraying
easy-to-wash-off paint over the facade of the Senate in Rome in
January.
More recently, after the Emilia-Romagna floods, UG members
staged another act of civil disobedience to highlight the need
to tackle the climate crisis, when two protestors covered
themselves in mud outside the Senate.
The Senate stunts are only part of a long series of
controversial acts of civil disobedience staged by the group
that have made them figures of hatred and contempt for some.
For example, they recently poured black liquid made from diluted
vegetable charcoal into the Trevi fountain in Rome.
The group of around ten people also stood inside the fountain
holding a banner reading 'We Won't Pay for Fossil Fuels' - a
reference to the campaign to stop public investment in, and
subsidies of, fossil fuels, which are behind the greenhouse
emissions causing the climate crisis.
Other UG protests have included splashing paint at the La Scala
opera house and the Vittorio Emanuele II statue in Milan,
sticking themselves to Botticelli's Spring at the Uffizi,
blocking the Mt Blanc Tunnel, throwing flour over an Andy Warhol
car in Milan, stripping off half naked and halting traffic on
Rome's ring road, throwing soup onto a Van Gogh, also in Rome,
and pouring diluted vegetable charcoal into the Four Rivers
Fountain in Piazza Navona in Rome.
In the light of such acts, the government has approved a
crackdown on art 'eco-vandals', with fines of up to 60,000
euros.
UG is part of the A22 network of climate civil-disobedience
groups in several countries, including Just Stop Oil in the UK,
Stop Old Growth in Canada, France's Derniere Renovation and
Declare Emergency in the United States.
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