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On a hike in northern Italy, a wire mesh fence suddenly stretches along the path. The dense forest behind it quickly disappears into opaque darkness. An eerie feeling emerges: What is being concealed from view here? Does the fence protect what lies inside or what lies outside? Seveso is close, and so from the darkness rise all the death zones of recent decades in memory, coupled with the awareness of one's own powerlessness.

Apart from gigantic contamination, pollution, and radiation, what remains for laypeople are scientific data that is difficult to understand and the desperate struggle to find adequate words for man-made disasters. At least there is the virtually inexhaustible repertoire of absurd curses from Hergé's Captain Haddock. Written in black on Haddock's sweater blue, always with a white-backed O, like the teeth in Haddock's black beard, they serve as a dissonant expression of inadequacy in the face of the ineffable.

ICONOCLASTE!

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