Melania Trump, left without a statue
A bronze statue representing US first lady Melania Trump was stolen in her native country, Slovenia.
‘The incident was reported on Tuesday. The police officers immediately went to the scene and an investigation was opened ‘to find the culprit, a police spokesman told AFP on Thursday.
In natural size and crowned on a tree trunk, in the middle of a private field near Sevnica, the city in the east of the country where Melania Trump spent his childhood, the statue revealed in 2020 a look greeting with his hand, in a gesture inspired by the image of the presidential couple from Donald Trump.
The author of the Opera, the American conceptual artist Brad Downey, explained that he wanted to create a ‘non-monument, counter-propaganda’, wanting to criticize the policies of the white house and reminding him that his own wife, born Melania Knavs, in Yugoslavia, is an immigrant.
The artist was declared ‘sad’ because of the disappearance of the work, which was firmly fixed by the trunk by concrete and iron bars, forcing the thieves to section the statue above the ankles.
‘I have the impression that he has something to do’ with the billionaire’s return to power, ‘but who knows?’, He told AFP.
A previous statue, depicting the former dummy in her famous blue dress, was burned by unknown and transformed into ash in July 2020. Sculpted coarsely with a saw from a tree trunk and compared to a bird scarecrow, but it had surrounded the world.
The discreet ‘first lady’ Melania Trump, 55, never visited the city, located about 90 kilometers from the Slovenian capital Ljubljana.
The former dummy left his native country with two million people before the end of communism and landed in the bright New York of the 1990s to continue his career. He has acquired American citizenship in 2016 and is Donald Trump’s third wife, and their son, Barron, speaks Slovenian.
If the first term of the Republican sparked high hopes in Sevnica, where the products bearing the label ‘Melania Trump’, the second was greeted with indifference and even hostility, in the context of Washington’s commercial war against the EU.
