What Does Viam inveniemus aut faciemus Mean?

Guest Blog by Tales From the EV Studio and Commando Jugendstil 

Why a title in Latin, some may ask?

A classical education will ruin your life and we can prove it, but that is not the only reason.

Viam inveniemus aut faciemus, we will find a way or we'll make one, is a riff on the sentence allegedly pronounced by Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca when his generals asked him how the heck they were going to pass the Alps.
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It was October, perhaps the beginning of November, and he had some sixty to ninety thousand people and a bunch of elephants to ferry across one of the steepest sections of the Alps.

Thing is, while Titus Livius and Polybius make it almost look like he didn't have any help in deciding which pass to take and how to do it, in fact, reading closely, it is clear that Celtic tribes from beyond the Alps had sent envoys to welcome and guide him and his army to Italy.

Without diminishing Hannibal's genius nor his balls of high-grade carbon steel, this was not a solitary endeavour but the work of an alliance of people who banded together for a purpose.
We chose this title because our story is about people coming together in spite of their differences to face adversity and overcome it through collective effort.

When extreme weather strikes Milano, the rescue effort by the team put together by the Commando could not happen without the support of the people who open them a way and find them equipment and pull and haul and toil together, in solidarity with those most affected, regardless of the colour of their skin or the place where their forebears were born.

One of the reasons we're so obsessed with Hannibal is that the major identitarian party in Italy used to bang on the drum of the Celtic past of Northern Italy and depict it as an idealised White-only, isolationist past as opposed to the recent waves of immigration, especially from North Africa.

That was obviously never true as the Gaulish/Celtic tribes of the Padan Plain traded with Greeks from Massalia and Etruscans from Felsina and Genoa and fought next to the Samnites and other Italics time and time again, but the story of Hannibal completely destroys the very notion of the isolationist white-only Celts.

The Insubres of Mediolanum and the Boii from Bononia welcomed the Carthaginians. They saw that army of Black and Brown people coming down from the Alps, half-frozen and battered and angry as heck and said: these are friends, these are blood-brothers. They armed and fed them and stuck with them through thick and thin for almost twenty years, up to Zama and beyond.

So let us get that straight: before the idea of Italy as a territorial continuity ever existed, before the Romans were welcome in Milano, Black and Brown people from over the mountains and across the sea were welcome as allies.

Our ancestors were never the racist, bigoted simulacra the right-wingers and identitarians like to wave around.

The past was never ethnically homogeneous or "pure".

We can't let anyone try to make the future fit their a-historical power fantasy.

The fight against identitarianism and all forms of white supremacy and xenophobia is something that solarpunk cannot overlook.
 
We need to build a society that works for everybody, that cares for the environment and for people, no matter where they are from or what's the colour of their skin.

We will find a way, or we'll make it together.
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Just like they did.

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​Commando Jugendstil is a real-life small collective of Italian solarpunk creators who aim to conjugate green technology and art to make cities a better place to live in and build creative communities. The incredible folks of Tales From the EV have helped them in translate their visions into fiction and so far this collaboration led to the design of artwork for Mamut Magazine n° 6 (Eco-logos) and Ecología Política n° 57 (Las artes y la ecología política), among other things. In these very days the Commando is trying to make their projects a reality through an EU grant — if all goes well then a solarpunk reality may not be too far away.

Tales From the EV is a posse of emigrant Italian writers who specialise in historical fantasy, archanepunk and scriptwriting for comics. Teaming up with the Commando Jugendstil gave them the chance to write short stories for Mamut Magazine n° 6 (Eco-logos), the independent UK publisher Bear With Me Books and for Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers. They were also invited to the International Turin Book Fair 2019, one of the most important in Europe, to talk about their stories and the solarpunk philosophy. Tales From the EV is interested in climate justice activism as well: they are an active part of the Earth Strike movement.