#ARRESTAMI: When Art Becomes Civil Resistance
A dystopian photo exhibition warns us about the erosion of civil liberties
On May 29, 2025, the city of Modena hosted #ARRESTAMI, a haunting photographic exhibition that projects visitors into a dystopian future where civil liberties have been progressively eroded and dissent has been criminalized.
The exhibition, also visible on Instagram (@arrestami2025), presents a series of black and white mugshots of ordinary citizens arrested during a peaceful LGBTQ+ demonstration imagined for October 22, 2025 – exactly 103 years after the fascist march on Rome.
According to the narrative created by the organizers, these images were supposedly "hacked" from the servers of the Ministry of the Interior, where a fictional "Moral Police" catalogued activists, protesters, and ordinary citizens detained for exercising their right to protest.
A Mirror to Our Present
The exhibition aims to highlight how the current Security Decree, with its criminalization of passive resistance, harsher penalties for road blockades during demonstrations, and new regulations that make even peaceful forms of protest punishable, represents a potential slide toward authoritarian control of dissent.
"Today it's LGBTQ+ activists, tomorrow who?" is the provocative question at the heart of the exhibition, inviting visitors to reflect on how accepting small limitations to freedoms can gradually lead to their complete erosion.
History as a Teacher We've Stopped Listening To
The special fascist laws of the 1920s began exactly like this: limiting dissent, criminalizing protest, restricting civil liberties one step at a time. Those who know the past recognize the signs. Those who forget history are condemned to relive it.
The Security Decree isn't just another law. It's the institutionalization of repression:
It criminalizes passive resistance and non-violent protest techniques
It transforms peaceful protesters into criminals punishable with up to six years in prison
It punishes with imprisonment those who block a road to demand justice
It protects those who abuse power, supporting their legal expenses with everyone's money
Become Part of This Act of Disobedience
The interactive aspect of the initiative allows the public, both at the exhibition and from home, to participate by creating their own "arrest." Just take a horizontal A4 sheet with the words "#ARRESTAMI" and below your condition: "separated mother," "homeless student," "protester," "gay," "pacifist," or any other category potentially at risk in a future of restrictions.
During the exhibition days, a photo set was available where visitors could be photographed in "mugshot" style, directly contributing to the expansion of the project.
The artistic project, born from the vision of Italian-French photographer Fabrizio de Gennaro, who personally curated all the shots, found space thanks to the organizational support of Arcigay Modena "Matthew Shepard."
A Final Warning
Freedom is like air: you only realize its value when it begins to run out. The images, in their raw essentiality, represent a visual warning against indifference and habituation to the gradual erosion of civil rights which, as history teaches us, rarely happens through dramatic institutional breaks, but more often through incremental normalization of restrictive practices.
The organizers emphasize that the urgency of the message is not a partisan critique, but an invitation to democratic vigilance: "We must not accept small limitations to freedom of opinion and protest, because slowly they all get eroded. We must oppose immediately, in every possible way."
Visit the exhibition at instagram.com/arrestami2025 and join the resistance.