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Foreword
Studies on Italian colonialism are today one of the most active areas of reflection in contemporary research, with increased collaboration between the academic and institutional spheres and the visual arts. This especially has to do with artists connected to research-based practices, who have been working almost in parallel to scholars, repeatedly bringing together both the premises and outcomes of their research. This has helped to consolidate a model of relationship that represents a case study “in progress”. Within this relationship, institutional and university activities are combined with research into colonial history and imaginaries — research which itself draws on visual, discursive and performative elaborations. This in turn serves to underscore the complementarity between theoretical and artistic approaches.
Academic Knowledge and Critical Insights
1965 saw the publication of the first of a series of crucial studies by Angelo Del Boca on the colonies: his La guerra d’Abissinia, 1935-1941. For the first time, an Italian scholar broke the silence on the use of mustard gas, mass atrocities and deportations during the war in Ethiopia, amidst a general context marked by the wilful burial of Italy’s colonial responsibilities and the inaccessibility of public sources.[1]. Since then, anyone who has critically dealt with the issue of Italian colonialism’s historical responsibilities and contemporary legacies has also had to address the processes of amnesia, the repression of memory, self-absolution, and the persistence and rememorialisation of Italian colonial history, and of the corresponding rhetorics and narratives. Studies on Italian colonialism have had to wade through murky “conflicts over memory”, marking out paths of analysis between the cover-ups, continuities and re-emergences of a past that — after decades in which it was not digested — is destined to resurface[2].
Starting from this initially marginal position, in Italian universities over the last forty years spaces and times of discussion have arisen that have allowed for articulated perspectives, methodologies and theoretical elaborations. They have, moreover, helped to define increasingly specific and well-documented disciplinary positions (emerging within historical studies, cultural-historical studies, including archaeological ones, and socio-anthropological analyses). We should here provide at least a superficial interpretation of these positions,[3] notwithstanding how complex it is to analyse these avenues of research in all their possible points of connection and intersection with the visual arts. Also drawing on the recent contributions mentioned below, it is crucial that we initiate a systematic interdisciplinary engagement, and a real fieldworkon the relationship between academic/institutional research and contemporary artistic research. This should help us to analyse the different ways in which the colonial past is entering into the Italian visual arts, which have themselves been prey to that “pervasive collective repression [of memory]” present in both Italian public opinion and its art system.[4].
Given the urgency but also the complexity of the topic, this article can relay only some of the issues that have emerged from recent studies on the relations between the academic/institutional world and artistic research. It does so from the perspective of an in-house curator at a public museum, namely the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome. In 2017 it integrated the collections of Rome’s former Museo Coloniale, and in recent years, starting from sensitive and problematic objects and documents connected to one-sided Italian colonial propaganda, the Museo delle Civiltà has expressly embarked on a process of rethinking the ways in which these collections are presented. This means building shared narratives with communities and individuals working in the fields of literature, art, contemporary publishing and activism, for the purpose of constructing critical practices that, in the museum context, must necessarily turn into a self-criticism. The author thus writes from a position within an institution that in turn positions itself between academia and the visual arts, as it supports the production and elaboration of narratives that differ from those of its own institutional past and experiments with interdisciplinary practices of cataloguing and restitution relating to Italy’s colonial past.
Porosity and Complementarity between Theoretical Approaches and Artistic Research
In recent decades, cultural institutions have been directly affected by the call to take on and experiment with a (self-)critical posture, generated by post-, de- and anti-colonial perspectives. Ethnographic museums, in particular, have been the object of a process that has challenged the rationale behind Western methods of interpretation, classification and presentation of non-European heritages. Indeed, despite the renewed awareness that does exist, these latter continue to actively work in the modes of self-preservation and reproducing the traditional museum function and its narratives.[5] On the Italian university front, various perspectives have been advanced to experiment with forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist and intersectional positioning, albeit within a broader context in which the production of Eurocentric knowledge and forms of exclusion still seems to predominate.[6] The editors of the monographic issue Razzismo e antirazzismo in Italia (2023) also point out that the genealogies of decolonial thought do not refer to the institutions of the official production and reproduction of disciplinary knowledge,[7] but rather start from claims and networks “from below”. This means emphasising the relationship between Eurocentric epistemic canon, colonialism, racism, the classification of otherness, the construction of objectivity and concealment of the ways in which knowledge is and ought to be historicised.
Given these considerations, we can identify paths that relate apparently distant worlds — such as the historical, theoretical and literary — giving rise to a porosity between different elaborations and codes of expression.[8] In considering the complementarity between university research and practices and artistic ones, it is here worth mentioning one of the first analyses of the critical visual arts production of recent decades, namely the 2020 volume edited by Francesca Gallo Anticolonialismo e postcolonialismo nelle arti visive: prospettive italiane. It proposes to reconstruct genealogies and fractures, identifying exemplary figures in the Italian experimentation on this topic. Over the last few decades, moreover, the emergence of the theme of relations between Italy and former colonial countries — as well as that of the connections and consequences associated with them in contemporary Italian society — has constituted the central and characterising aspect of artists’ research, with a particular focus on relations with Ethiopia and Libya.[9]
In Italy, academies of fine arts have been among the platforms that have most incisively analysed the relationships between colonial studies and artistic research. This owes to the fact that they are permeated by a practice that is both reflexive and pedagogical — a practice of art history and criticism, and a practice of live, real-time teaching. Crucial in this sense is the research of Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi, carried out based on a survey conducted between 2017 and 2018 at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, which later informed the volume Colonialità e culture visuali in Italia.[10] The book is presented as “a consciousness-raising and deconstruction operation” that promotes dialogue among the theoretical research and practices of Italian and African artists over the last three decades, with “the ambition of rendering, in some measure, the coordinates of a network-in-the-makingof authors and researchers that … has begun to construct a system of cultural and political alliances and affinities”.[11] Another important piece study concerning academies of fine arts as sites and moments of connection is the research conducted by researchers such as Viviana Gravano and Giulia Grechi, co-founders of the journal roots§routes. Research on visual cultures. Some of its issues have been dedicated to dialogue between theoretical and artistic reflection on the Italian colonial past.[12] The work of stitching together these two galaxies of the cultural universe can also be found in various projects conducted by academies and international cultural institutions active in Italy, such as the exhibition Tutto passa tranne il passato, organised in 2020 by the Goethe Institut in collaboration with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.[13] But this list could go on, widening the panorama to include also non-institutional sites, which — as Cippitelli and Frangi suggest — play a leading role in the work of post-colonial transition in Italy and constitute a “ramified and underground[14] elsewhere that has taken forward processes of anti-colonial political awakening in informal and resistant archives”.[15] Among others, we could mention the mobile activity of independent curatorial platforms such as Rome’s Spazio Griot or the Locales collective, which are both also partners of the Museum of Civilisations.
The Zeret Massacre: Working between Historical Reconstruction and Artistic Research
In 2021-2022, the PAC project — the Plan for Contemporary Art, within the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity — allowed the Museo delle Civiltà to acquire a series of works inspired by certain episodes relating to Italian colonial history.[16] By activating axes of attention and memory regarding certain episodes forgotten by public opinion, these works mark a break in the linearity and self-referentiality of the former Museo Coloniale’s collection. One is the series of photographs taken from Rossella Biscotti’s broader research, Note su Zeret (2014-2015), currently on display in the Museo delle opacità exhibition itinerary, which presents and reinterprets works and objects from the collections of Rome’s former Museo Coloniale (1914-1971) through a dialogue with works of contemporary art.[17] The artist has created a “visual diary” of the cave of Zeret, site of one of the most violent massacres perpetrated by the Italian army against the Ethiopian population. After the invasion the cave became a refuge for resistance fighters and their families; but in April 1939, it was besieged and brutally attacked by the Italians, including with mustard gas, killing some two thousand people. Biscotti visited and photographed the cave with the consent of the community, and was accompanied by ten of its members led by Elfinesh Tegeni, a descendant of one of the survivors. The artist’s work counts among those artistic research projects that — in recovering the less easily “musealised” traces of Italian colonial history and elaborating on the relationship between the falsifications in official propaganda and contemporary oral memory — focus on the need to work in institutional voids in order to repair (rather than fill) them with a collective memory. These are spaces in which the public and the private, the museum and its responsibilities (finally?) come face to face.
Biscotti’s research is also related to that carried out in 2006 by Matteo Dominioni, as illustrated by his article Etiopia 11 April 1939. La strage segreta di Zeret.[18] Here, the historian reconstructs the events relating to the repression of Ethiopian resistance during the years that followed the official beginning of the occupation in 1936, and gives an account of his personal mission to Zeret carried out between 10 and 22 April 2006.[19] Dominioni himself takes a number of photographs that accompany the article, which, although ancillary to the story, become testimonial evidence of his historical reconstruction. Looking at these images and at Biscotti’s work a feeling of continuity materialises, despite their different forms of expression. We feel this continuity in their choice of which details to represent (outside and inside the cave), their respective visual testimonies of a physical presence tracing the fragments of an event unknown to public opinion, the participation of the local community, and the doubts behind the possible choice to show violent images. How can these different types of research — the artistic, and the historical — be combined? How can we put the visual diaries of the scholar and the artist into perspective?
The differences and binds of reciprocity demand that we pay attention, and demand that we take a position. This is an ethical fact, even more than an aesthetic one, and attempts to respond to a perceived necessity: that of also positioning ourselves politically in the contemporary cultural system, telling diversified (newspaper and museum) audiences about aspects of our past that were hitherto considered marginal, but have evident ramifications in our present. In this sense, the plurality of methods and sensibilities from different contexts can open up plural forms of social history — and help to deconstruct the artistic narratives with which their representation is shared.
[1] M. Dominioni, Il maestro Del Boca. Un ricordo di chi ha conosciuto dal vicino, Dinamopress, 22 July 2021 (https://www.dinamopress.it/news/il-maestro-del-boca-un-ricordo-di-chi-lo-ha-conosciuto-da-vicino/, last visit: 10.10.2023).
[2] On the subject of the repression of the Italian colonial past, see: N. Labanca, History and Memory of Italian Colonialism Today, in J. Andall, D. Duncan (eds.), Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, Peter Lang, pp. 29-40; A. Triulzi, Displacing the Colonial Event, in “Interventions”, vol. 8 (3), Routledge, 2006; M. Mellino, Italy and Postcolonial Studies. A Difficult Encounter, in “Interventions”, vol. 8 (3), Routledge, 2006; A. Del Boca, The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Default of Italian Colonialism, in P. Palumbo (ed.), A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, University of California Press, 2003, pp. 17-36; V. Deplano – A. Pes, Quel che resta dell’impero. La cultura coloniale degli italiani, Mimesis, 2014; G. Grechi – V. Gravano, Presente imperfetto. Eredità coloniali e immaginari razziali contemporanei, Mimesis, 2016.
[3] Although there is no tradition of colonial studies organised in specific departments in Italy, it is worth mentioning, without claiming to be exhaustive, some authors who initiated and contributed to the development of academic research on the history of Italian colonialism: A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale, Laterza, 1976-1986, 1988-1990; N. Labanca, L’Africa in vetrina. Storie di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia, Pagus, 1992; Id., Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale, Il Mulino, 2002; Id., History and Memory of Italian Colonialism Today, in J. Andall, D. Duncan (eds.), Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 29-40; Id., La guerra italiana per la Libia. 1911-1931, Biblioteca storica, Il Mulino, 2012; Id., La guerra d’Etiopia. 1935-1941, Le vie della civiltà series, Il Mulino, 2015; G. Dore, Antropologia e colonialismo italiano. Rassegna di studi di questo dopoguerra, in “La Ricerca Folklorica – La cultura popolare. Questioni teoriche”, no. 1, April 1980, Grafo Spa, pp. 129-132; G. Dore, Per una storia sociale del colonialismo italiano, in “Passato e Presente”, March 2018, pp. 129-132; A. Triulzi, ed., Fotografia e storia dell’Africa (proceedings of the international congress, Rome-Naples, 9-11 September 1992), I.U.O., 1995; C. Lombardi-Diop, C. Romeo, ed., L’Italia postcoloniale, Mondadori, 2014.
[4] Francesca Gallo writes: “While the postcolonial perspective clearly emerged in international artistic proposals during the 1990s, Italian art in recent decades has rarely dealt with its own national colonialism, being caught up in the general and pervasive collective repression [of memory]] — which historians first began to undermine, faced with a thousand resistances — and in the persistence of the failure to decolonise public memory”, F. Gallo, ed., Anticolonialismo e postcolonialismo nelle arti visive: prospettive italiane, “From the European South” no. 6, p. 3.
[5] The museum as an institution has been at the centre of reflections and critical readings that have analysed its specific rhetoric and practices of communication and representation (cf. J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, 1988; I. Karp, S.D.Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), its classifying procedures, processes of decontextualisation, and predatory tendencies (S.Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Chicago University Press, 2002; M.O. Gonseth, J. Hainard, R. Kaehr, eds., Le musée cannibale. Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel Ed., 2002), and relations of power and knowledge (T. Bennett, The Exhibitionary Complex, “new formations”, no. 4, spring 1988). On the first design practices experimented in the 2000s at the former Museo Preistorico Etnografico L. Pigorini, see: R.A. Di Lella, Progettazione partecipata e dialogo con le comunità della diaspora, in “Nuova Museologia”, no. 41, November 2019, pp. 55-59; V. Lattanzi, Musei e antropologia. Storie, esperienze, prospettive, Carocci, 2021.
[6] T. Petrovich Njegosh, V. Ribeiro Corossacz, Introduzione: saperi e pratiche decoloniali, in Razzismo e antirazzismo in Italia. Saperi e pratiche decoloniali attraversano l’università italiana, “From the European South. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities”, no. 12, 2023, p. 6.
[7] Decolonial thinking is rooted in “the struggles for survival of historically oppressed groups in Abya Ayala and North America, groups appropriated in the social relations of race, gender/sexuality, and class that challenge the concrete effects of the valorisation of the Eurocentric paradigm”, ibid. p. 8.
[8] Since the 1990s, the panorama of theoretical approaches and research practices has been intertwined with a discursive production on Italian colonial history, involving works by Italian and Afro-descendant writers — the literary production ranging from Ennio Flaiano, Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed to Pap Khouma, Gabriella Ghermandi, Francesca Melandri and Igiaba Scego, to give but a few examples. Advancing a critical dynamic with respect to the colonial past, this has introduced a postcolonial narrative to Italy, exploring new paths compared to traditional historical novel, in the renewed relationship between historiographic discourse and literary narrative discourse (Cf. M. Bovo Romœuf, Vers un canon postcolonial multiculturel: Les cas paradigmatiques de Gabriella Ghermandi et Martha Nasibù, in M. Bovo Romœuf and F. Manai, eds., Memoria storica e postcolonialismo. Il caso italiano, Peter Lang, 2015).
[9] The relations between Italy and Libya, as analysed by Francesca Gallo, are the focus of some productions by Martina Melilli, Leone Contini and Alessandra Ferrini, with different approaches ranging from the memorial and autobiographical dimension to the postcolonial critical perspective (F. Gallo, L’arte contemporanea di fronte al colonialismo italiano in Libia, tra autobiografia, memoria e critica postcoloniale, in “La Diana”, no. 3, 2022, pp. 105-119).
[10] The research resulted in a curatorial workshop, a public programme and the 2019 exhibition project Amnistia. Colonialità italiana tra cinema, critica e arte contemporanea (Milan, 2018).
[11] L. Cippitelli, S. Frangi, eds., Colonialità e culture visuali in Italia. Percorsi critici tra ricerca artistica, pratiche teoriche e sperimentazioni pedagogiche, Mimesis 2021, pp. 13-14. Among the artists whose essays or interventions are published or republished in this collection, we find Angelica Pesarini, Neelam Srivastava, Liliana Ellena, Peter Friedl, Gaia Giuliani, Wissal Houbabi, and Alessandra Ferrini.
[12] For the topics covered by the magazine, please refer to: <https://www.roots-routes.org/infine/> (20 October 2023).
[13] The exhibition was accompanied by a “discursive programme” of panel discussions and contributions from international activists, artists, experts, curators and researchers: <https://fsrr.org/mostre/tutto-passa-tranne-il-passato-everything-passes-except-the-past-festival-sulleredita-post-coloniale/>.
[14] [TN: The Italian expression used here, carsico, literally translating as “karstic”, refers to the power of water moving underground in multiple directions, through streams, rivers, caves and springs]
[15] L. Cippitelli, S. Frangi, eds., Colonialità e culture visuali in Italia, cit., pp. 15-16.
[16] The Museo delle Civiltà’s proposal, entitled Metodologia contemporanea: cambiare linguaggio e riscrivere storie, was presented under the curatorship of Matteo Lucchetti, who is the museum’s curator for Contemporary Arts and Cultures.
[17] Museo delle opacità (June 6, 2023 — in progress), curated by Gaia Delpino, Rosa Anna Di Lella and Matteo Lucchetti, is a new chapter dedicated to the ongoing rearrangement of museum collections and narratives: a core group of works and documents from the collections of the former Museo Coloniale, which became part of the Museo delle Civiltà’s collections in 2017 and are currently being recatalogued.
[18] M. Dominioni, Etiopia 11 April 1939. La strage segreta di Zeret, in “Italia Contemporanea”, no. 243, June 2006, pp. 287-302.
[19] Also taking part in the mission were Yonatan Sahle, a young researcher from the University of Arba Minch in southern Ethiopia, and — as a driver — Kebbedè Cherinet, who supported the researcher and helped her to locate the cave.
