Kaputt, 2013

Maurizio Cattelan

Narrator: In “Kaputt” the bodies of five horses protrude from a wall. Like reversed hunting trophies, their lifeless carcasses have been hung up, instead of their heads.
 
“Kaputt” is also the title of a novel from 1944 by the controversial Italian writer Curzio Malaparte. It contains a detailed account of the horrors of the Second World War on the Eastern Front, where Malaparte was a war correspondent.
 
In “Kaputt”, he describes an event where hundreds of horses from the Soviet artillery were driven through the Karelian forest by a fire. They ran out into lake Ladoga, where the water rapidly froze to ice in the cold winter’s night and trapped them in their death throes.
 
Malaparte portrays the scene that the patrols encountered when they reached the lake the next day: “The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an axe. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burned in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.”
 
Assuming that these are the horses from Curzio Malaparte’s novel, we are viewing the scene from the bottom of lake Ladoga, under the ice, in a decaying world beyond salvation.