It's not a metaphor, it's not an artistic provocation, it's not even a protest.

It is a man urinating on the statues of Costantino Nivola, under the Regional Council on Via Roma in Cagliari.

The photograph captures the exact moment in which incivility becomes a public gesture, almost normal and distracted.

It happened right in the city center, in front of one of the symbolic places of Sardinian politics.

The works of Nivola—an internationally renowned artist, one of the few Sardinians capable of translating their homeland into the language of modern art—become an improvised urinal.

And so the photographed scene becomes news. And suddenly it's no longer just a prank, nor just an obscene act: it's an uncomfortable mirror of how we treat what should represent us .

No one intervenes, no perceived limits, no threshold of respect. Public art reduced to an urban backdrop, invisible like any other wall.

You don't have to cry foul to understand that something isn't working.

That man is using that space as if it were a no-man's land. And when public space becomes a no-man's land, art is always the first to pay the price.

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