We are looking at a work by Mark Lombardi, entitled, Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, c.1979-1990, 4th version. The work is a two color pencil drawing. And at first it looks like a organizational chart of some form. It is very large, and it organizes along to horizontal axes, a number of protagonists that were involved in the titular events of the work. The Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, was the fourth largest bank in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. And like many other institutions at the time was involved in one of the large banking scandals that led the groundwork to some of the financial crises of the late 1980s. The Banca Nazionale del Lavoro was involved in a number of very large loans to the government of Iraq after 1979, that were ostensibly intended to support agricultural development and acquisition of agricultural machinery, but were unofficially used by the government of Iraq to arm the country. And it's now been established that many of the lenders which included the United States government, were well aware of the fact that the money was used to this purpose. What Mark Lombardi is doing here, is he is piecing together and visualizing the events, the protagonists, the institutions and additional information in order to create a diagram or flowchart or another kind of visual organization to indicate how the actors, the events, and the results were all intricately connected. Often, Lombardi begins his research process by transcribing each individual mention of a protagonist or an institution from secondary literature on to an individual index card, which by the end of his process had amassed a number of over 14,000. We have to keep in mind that this was done at a time when the internet was in its infancy and information was much more difficult to come by. Every single bit of information that Mark Lombardi put into these works, comes from public sources. They come from newspaper articles, they come from books. And this is all secondary information that with the right amount of footwork, could easily be in brought together. The process it really generates this work, is the very very diligent collecting off this public information, the cross-referencing through the index card and then finding the ultimate form of data visualization to map it onto this grid or diagram. You will see that there are two organizational structures in place. One are these two long horizontal lines that serve as a kind of timeline. And then there are circular lines from individual nodes of activity, institutions or agencies to individual people. And there are diagrams that are entirely circular they are diagrams that look more like a star chart. So these kind of decisions come out of smaller drawings that Mark Lombardi would make in order to map out the individual details. He never truly considered his works finished, which is why this one is called the fourth version. Because as new information came to light, he would add the information in or sometimes redraw the diagrams. For many is Lombardi's art has easily been described as conspiracy art. By which some meant that it was art that unearthed, visualized, published, brought to the fore large-scale, corporate or government conspiracies. But often it was meant also in it's inverse, that it was the work of somebody who was a conspiracy theorist. It was the work of somebody who is a quack or hack, or somebody who believed certain things that just simply could not be proven and thus should be assumed as invented or false. If we look closely, we realized that the red events and the red lines are proven connections. These are public judgments, they are convictions, they are elements in this larger web of shadow operations that have come irrevocably to the public. Things that are proven, things that are published, things that happened. In opposition to that, we could then come to look at all the events and connections drawn in black, and see them as slightly less clear. These are relations that are established but not further articulated. Is this person and that person connected because they did a business dealing together? Because they played golf together? Because their children knew each other? Lombardi doesn't make that clear. And so this drawing does not only articulate the relations between these characters, but also the uncertainty that we inevitably have in trying to definitively link certain actors to certain events, certain protagonists to certain institutions and so on.
