Screengrab Diary from a Barbarian Land by minusplato

Screengrab Diary from a Barbarian Land Richard Fletcher Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy, Ohio State University fletcher.161@osu.edu

DAY 1 Dear Yervant Gianikian, I hope this finds you well and you don’t mind me writing out of the blue. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at Ohio State University and I write this blog, Minus Plato as part of my research into the 2017 exhibition documenta 14, held between Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany, which you participated in, along with your lifelong collaborator and partner Angela Ricci Lucchi. Before I go any further, I want to offer you my heartfelt condolences on Angela’s passing at the end of last year. I cannot imagine how you are coping with this loss, as so much of your life and work has been intertwined with hers. I know that you have been touring and introducing your 2018 film I Diari di Angela – Noi Due Cineasti (Angela’s Diaries: Two Filmmakers) and so must be used to responding to audiences who are trying to make sense of this painful artistic transition. At the same time, I am sure that in discussing work that you and Angela completed together, it must feel like you are being asked to channel the dead, and so I understand if I never hear back from you about any of the questions I have about your participation in documenta 14.

Although it cannot compare to your own fresh grief, Minus Plato underwent its own process of mourning as a response to the November 2016 election of a white supremacist President, which resulted in me posting every day, visiting documenta 14 and leaving the academic field of Classics. (I document this process in my chapter “Mourning Diary” in my forthcoming book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump.)

But I am not writing to you about that (although choosing the form of the daily diary does bring me back to that time). Instead, this series of posts is part of the book I am currently writing, provisionally called The Great Unlearning: Artistic Precedence and Curricular Decoloniality at and after documenta 14. (The working title shifts regularly, so maybe it will have changed before I finish writing to you!). My current work on this project comprises visits to global biennial-style exhibitions (e.g. FRONT in Cleveland, Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the Sharjah Biennial 14, as well as the upcoming Havana Biennial, Venice Biennale and Toronto Biennial) to see if any of the core themes of documenta 14 (e.g. decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, post queer politics and alternative Modernisms) are present as well as any overlap with specific artists (do you have plans to show work in any such context in the near future?)

But today I am writing this to you as an extension of another form of research that I am carrying out for this project. This coming Saturday I am scheduled to present a paper at a conference here at OSU called Italian Cinema(s) Abroad. I knew that I wanted to speak about your work at documenta 14, so I submitted a traditional academic abstract, which was accepted, under the title: Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema on Greek Public Television: Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s Pays Barbare at documenta 14. I don’t want to bore you with the contents

of this abstract, especially as I have no intention of delivering the paper on Saturday. Instead I will read these dairy entries and show their accompanying screengrabs from your 2013 film Pays Barbere, turning the conference audience into witnesses to our (admittedly one-sided!) correspondence. As a Classicist, I became increasingly frustrated by the way academics write on an author or artist, a poem or work of philosophy, and breaking free of that dead discipline to work with living artists has been transformative for me. This is why I am writing to and for you, and not for the audience I will be reading this to. At the same time, your and Angelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, and its â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;analytic cameraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, has taught me that we cannot forget our audiences. The opening two sequences of found footage in Pays Barbere, ostensibly showing the dead body of Mussolini in 1945 and then the parading fascist leader in Libya in 1926, also pans across the assembled crowds at each event.

Just as the camera (importantly not your camera) is seen and addressed, by either a woman pointing to it or a young cadet saluting it as if Il Duce, I am reminded that your audiences cannot forget you either, in your artistic re-presentations of history and politics.

It is out of this dynamic between artist and audience that my main question, which will weave through all of this week of screengrabs and posts, arises. How does a more nuanced understanding of audience for your contributions to documenta 14, especially the screening of Pays Barbere on Greek public television for KEIMENA, counter the narrative (represented in the media) that the exhibition was a neocolonial project of disaster tourism? In short, I want to ask how do your films and installations, in their particular way of presenting an artistic intervention into historical Italian fascism and colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s to a contemporary audience, inform debates about white supremacy in current right-wing politics and their basis in the continuity of the colonial matrix of power? Big, heady questions, I know!

I will get started tomorrow, but now I have to go. I am attending a conversation at the Wexner Center for the Arts between filmmaker John Waters and writer Lynne Tillman. Do you know Tillman’s Madame Realism stories? I just read one called “Madame Realism in Freud’s Dreamland” and it reminded me of “The French” section of Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia (which I read on your recommendation). While the resemblance was based on the way writers transport you to exhibitions and museums with their words, it was Mandelstam’s specific

description of what he calls the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;second stageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in the process of looking and its relation to realism that made me see the connection:

the second stage of restoring the picture, the washing of it, removing its old peel, its outer and most recent barbaric layer, the stage that links it, as it does every work of art, to a sunny, solid reality.

More tomorrow.

Best wishes,

Richard Fletcher

DAY 2 Dear Yervant, I hope this finds you well. I realized that I was somewhat vague in yesterday’s post when I wrote about what would constitute a more “nuanced understanding of audience” for your contributions to documenta 14, specifically the screening of Pays Barbare as part of the Public TV program KEIMENA. Allow me to spend today’s entry fleshing out what I mean.

The reason that I submitted an abstract about your and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s work to the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference and why I decided to read this series of posts to and for you (in lieu of an academic paper), is that I am coming to the end of the first phase of an experimental research project that uses the setting of the university to challenge the simplistic and sometimes sensationalist media coverage of documenta 14 (archived under the page ‘Mediating documenta 14’ on Minus Plato).

The first paper, called “Trans migrant bodies, stolen fake stones and other exercises of freedom at the ‘stateless’ exhibition documenta 14”, was part of a paper workshop session of the symposium Naming (In)Justice: Rights and Resistance Across Queer Migrations and Trafficking. In the paper I examined the controversy surrounding the ‘theft’ of documenta 14 artist Roger Bernat’s prop as part of his performative work The Place of the Thing by the activist group LGBTQ + Refugees in Greece. While the reporting on this controversy polarized the artist and activists, my paper sought to find a shared commitment to challenging the framing institution of Documenta itself.

The second paper, called “We Mediterraneans: A Chorus of Crossings and a Century of Camps at documenta 14”, was presented at the roundtable Migration in the Global Mediterranean as part of the 3rd Migration Studies Symposium, The Borders and Boundaries of Migration Studies.

In the paper I discussed the cancellation of the documenta 14 event, a reading of the poem Auschwitz on the Beach by Italian philosopher and activists Franco “Bifo” Berardi due to a media campaign in the German press and Jewish communities. I argued that rather than ‘relativizing’ the Holocaust, Berardi’s account of his poem at the replacement event (called Shame on Us) chimed with other works at documenta 14 that called for an ongoing conception of fascism and specifically white nationalist necropolitics at work in the global refugee crisis.

Now, the impetus for me to fold this presentation at the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference into the ‘Mediating documenta 14’ project, was less a specific one-off controversy, as in the case of Bernat and Berardi, but the media anticipation of the documenta 14 exhibition itself in terms of an accusation of neocolonialism and crisis tourism. Although these accusations were made later and in more detail by Greek intellectuals (such as by Greek curator iLiana Fokianaki and former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis in their June 2017 E-Flux piece ‘We Come Bearing Gifts’), they were also the basis for a piece written on Artnet by Cathryn Drake, which summarized the critical reception of the documenta 14 team in Athens at the end of March 2017.

Drake’s article, with the descriptive title “Here’s Why Greece Is Not Exactly Rolling Out the Red Carpet for documenta 14”, offers an almost diaristic account of the missteps taken by artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his team as they negotiated a hostile Greek political climate. Specifically, Drake combines the presentation of documenta 14 events (mainly as part of the public program The Parliament of Bodies) with the commemoration of historical events in Greece (e.g. October 28th, Oxi day commemorating the refusal of Mussolini in 1940 or November 17th, the anniversary of the student uprising in 1973 and the annual anarchist march on the US embassy or December 6, and the more recent 2008 riots after the police killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos), to show how the global art exhibition was tone-deaf to the context they were working within. It is within this context that Drake introduces the Public TV program KEIMENA:

A week later [after December 6th], the Greek public television station ERT aired documentaries about the German massacre at Kalavryta on December 13, 1943, followed [on December 19th] by the start of documenta’s weekly broadcast of films, called “Keimena” (Texts). Curated by Hila Peleg and Vassily Bourikas, many of them focused on human rights issues around the world.

Although Drake doesn’t go into more detail here, the implication is that the Public TV program was imposing itself onto Greek documentary traditions that were commemorating their own history and its tragedies.

It is within this context that I want to insert the third scene from Pays Barbare, your 2013 film that would be shown as part of KEIMENA on July 31st, 2017. Following the footage of crowds celebrating the death of Mussolini in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto on April 29th, 1945, and crowds of cadets hailing Il Duce in Libya in 1926, you and Angela include footage from the boat crossing to Libya of that same year, with people dancing and having fun. (It is this precise scene in your film that opens the advertisement of the KEIMENA screening on ERT2 – here is the link – and screengrabs from which, from a version on YouTube with German subtitles, have been accompanying the present post).

Across this footage, as you well know, the same French text is first sung by Angela and then read by you, Yervant:

We play and dance on the Mediterranean,

this border of Europe

that today rejects those who flee wars and hunger,

and risk drowning in the sea,

this deep tomb.

This text directly addresses the present (2012-2013) Mediterranean refugee crisis in a way that would directly resonate with the Greek viewers of ERT2. In doing so, as I will make the case tomorrow, the KEIMENA program was much more nuanced than ‘focused on human rights issues around the world”, it was channeling experimental documentary film for a specifically contemporary Greek context, in terms of ‘crisis’ (debt, refugee etc) as part of an ongoing conception of fascism and specifically white nationalist necropolitics.

I will continue to follow this thread tomorrow, as now I have to teach my class Philosophical Problems in the Arts, in which we are discussing how ideas of aesthetic judgment and experience (c.f. Hume and Kant) can be used to understand documenta 14, specifically the 3-day inaugural Parliament of Bodies series in Kassel called How does it feel to be a problem? which Paul Preciado describes as follows: The Parliament of Bodies takes W. E. B. Du Bois’s question “How does it feel to be a problem?” as a possible interpellation directed today at the “99 percent” of the planet, taking into

consideration the process that African philosopher Achille Mbembé has called “becoming black of the world.” Whereas the modern colonial and patriarchal regime invented the “worker,” the “domestic woman,” the “black,” the “indigenous,” and the “homosexual,” today new government technologies are inventing new forms of subjection: from the criminalized Muslim to the undocumented migrant, from the precarious worker to the homeless, from the disabled to the sick as consumers of the industries of normalization to the sexualized worker, and the undocumented transsexual.

Until then,

Richard

DAY 3 Dear Yervant,

I am going to try to keep this post short, not only for our future audience at the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference, but also because I am grappling with some difficult news and my head is elsewhere right now. As promised yesterday, I will try to contextualize Pays Barbare within other films shown as part of the documenta 14 Public TV program KEIMENA. But the way I wanted to do this was to be guided by the next few sections of the film and how you and Angela conceptualize Italian colonialism as both something mundane and also as a form of inverted barbarism (we will get to how this relates to fascism – then and now, there and here – later in the week).

Following the scenes of dancing on the boat to Libya, as the passengers disembark, you list all of the types of people who go on what you dub their ‘African adventure’ – entrepreneurs, bankers, officials, researchers, doctors, priests, nuns and missionaries. All of whom you describe as ‘impatient to save the Africans from superstition and slavery.’

As the scene shifts to focus on the crowds in Libya watching the new arrivals (and the film is tinted a reddish-pink), your narration turns to address the brutal facts of the occupation: 100,000 deported, no prisoners taken, executions, of men, women and children.

This back and forth between the colonizers, the colonized, the mundane detail and the realities of the atrocities, repeats itself. The reading of a love letter from a young worker to her fiancé, a gunner, stationed in Tobruk is followed by a description (spoken first by you, Yervant, then sung by Angela) of the carnival as “a euphemism for the description of brutal conquest” and the military parades. By highlighting the costumes of the protagonists as you move from parading soldiers back to ‘normal’ people in a carnival, you bring us face to face with the basic tension in your film and, perhaps in the whole KEIMENA project:

The individuals

Neither perverse nor sadistic

Rather normal

A horrible normalcy

It is this ‘horrible normalcy’ that appears across the films included in the KEIMENA program. So as not to make this post longer than it should be, let me just list them here and I return to them tomorrow:

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala) (2013) by CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)

Ku Qian (Bitter Money) (2016) by Wang Bing

Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans) (2013) by Narimane Mari Angriff auf die Demokratie – Eine Intervention (Democracy Under Attack – An Intervention) (2012) by Romuald Karmakar

Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) (1977) by Kidlat Tahimik

Leviathan(2012) by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Passing Drama (1999) by Angela Melitopoulos

An Opera of the World (2017) by Manthia Diawar

In the case of each of these films, it is midnight in Greece and you turn on the television, not to be confronted by a pure evil or simple political lesson, but a complex tale in which prizing apart of perpetrators and victims, the civilized and the barbarian is made increasingly impossible to do. I am reminded of a group reading of the autobiographical text ‘Étant Donnés’, by Sylvère Lotringer in my graduate seminar about theory, decolonization and documenta 14. In describing his search for the person who gave him his name as a child, a Juste, the 0.5% of the non-Jewish French population who helped Jews during the Vichy regime in France, Lotringer ends the piece with an alarming note:

I felt a mixture of sadness and revulsion. What were the Injustes doing in France during that time, the 99.5 percent one never mentions? And what are they doing today?

Anyway, with that question ringing in our ears, I will write more tomorrow.

Best wishes, Richard

DAY 4 Dear Yervant, I know it would be easier to follow-up on yesterday’s post about how Pays Barbare and its documenting of a ‘horrible normalcy’, itself and as part of the KEIMENA Public TV program, by directly addressing the question of fascism – then and now. In fact, you do so yourself in your voice-over, when you say:

Fascism is a form of government

which makes it possible

to subjugate a whole people

However, I will defer that discussion until tomorrow because I want to use today’s post to dwell a little longer on the colonial on my way towards contextualizing Pays Barbare within the Public TV program and also in relation to the other two works you showed at documenta 14.

To do so, I need to first return to the accusation leveled against documenta 14 for being ‘neocolonial’ is grounded in a focus on the ostensible subject-matter of the KEIMENA program (recall Drake’s description of “many of [the films]” focusing “on human rights issues around the world”).

But what happens if we pay attention to the aesthetic and formal decisions taken by the artists and filmmakers, like you and Angela, who made them, and which extend into the literal ‘keimena’ (texts) commissioned for the program by its curators Hilga Peleg and Vassily Bourikas?

As the curators note on their general description of the program:

The films are chosen both for their pertinent subject matter, as well as for the singular filmic forms they present. Each provides a reflection on some of the most invisible, fleeting, and quotidian aspects of human social relations as well as those of global structures of power. Each film develops its own unique language to reflect the intangible reality it presents Consider the following excerpts from the ‘texts’ to accompany the lists of films I selected yesterday:

Without narration, the film assembles footage shot over the past decade, documenting a way of life as depicted by those living it. The spectacle of maritime existence is accentuated by the varied, painterly visual textures caused by rapid changes in phone camera quality.

[T]he filmmaker follows a group of workers in their daily lives, caught between long shifts and brief resting moments in a dormitory, where cordiality gives way to complaints and cell phone screens stand in for emotional relations. [The] film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeriaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play.

He mainly used the material recorded by the organizers; that these were full of technical problems became part of the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aesthetic.

[The] film, is a landmark of independent cinema, a ramshackle bridge short-circuiting the system that had kept first- and third-world experiences apart.

The film turns the cinematic gaze into an immersive experience that offers a hallucinatory, unsettling, and crude depiction of modern industrial fishery. As the witnesses struggle to talk of mass slaughter and forced labor, the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images waste away into white noise or slip into abstraction.

[U]pon receiving the invitation to participate in documenta 14, [the artist/filmmaker] decided to edit his long-planned film in Athens, connecting here to an editor, Kenan Akkawi, whose own family had come from Syria to Greece some 30 years ago, when he was a boy. The collaboration

added depth to a rich story of migrations: crossing into the world of opera from the tradition of sung wisdoms which has characterized West African culture for centuries; the movement of opera from Europe to Africa and the movement of people across continents in search of better lives…

This chorus of voices describing this selection of films not only maintains the closest possible relationship between the ostensible ‘subject matter’ and their experimental filmic forms (challenging the very generic category of ‘documentary’), but also by projecting their effect on their audiences through a sense of identification with the ‘ramshackle bridge’ of the mechanisms of independent filmmaking (e.g. on phones, including ‘technical problems’), as well as generating certain disturbing and aesthetically powerful effects (e.g. ‘hallucinatory’, ‘painterly’, ‘force and beauty’, ‘abstraction’).

It is within this context that Pays Barbare must have been experienced in their midnight viewing (or later streaming) in Greece, yet when we read the ‘text’ written by Andrea Lissoni for KEIMENA, we can appreciate how deeply your work, especially your use of the contraption of the ‘analytic camera’, challenges the audience to disturb the neat genre of documentary and context of television viewing:

Between the First and Second World Wars, their country succumbed to fascism and perpetrated horrors in Libya and Eritrea. Ricci Lucchi and Gianikian source a wide variety of images from the time: aerial shots, domestic, industrial, and propaganda footage; photographs; different film stocks; and drawings. Each image is scrutinized and re-photographed, creating a “new” image which bears witness to the act of looking. This obsessive analysis of the image, a process of

“scanning,” lends Barbaric Land its jarring, disruptive form. This is the artists’ message: never let anything be forgotten; resist the flow; resist silence. No posture could be more political. Lissoni’s analysis of your ‘analytic camera’ (your contraption for re-filming footage frame-byframe) can be easily supported by a brief examination of one sequence from Pays Barbare. At around the 30 minute mark, you have the intertitles show: Original ‘Carton’ from 1935-1936, followed by the unattributed text: “Ethiopia, this primitive and barbaric land, now the hour of civilization comes”

What follows is an opening sequence of tribal war dances.

Then a series of close-up shots of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;nativesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, highlighting the naked bodies of women.

In your voice over you give some context, while also making the analogy between the found film and the bodies it depicts:

Recently we returned

to rummage through the film archives

We searched for photographs from Ethiopia, Abyssinia

From the time of Italian colonization

Bared female body And the ‘Body” of films

A worn film strip

even torn, by numerous views.

The analogy is made a specific as possible during footage of a white Italian solder washing the neck and body of an Ethiopian woman – possibly the most disturbing sequence from your entire film.

It is, however, at this terrifying moment of brutal and patriarchal colonial manipulation and its voyeuristic gaze that you decide to transport us back to the present and to the Mediterranean refugee crisis, by addressing your Greek television audience directly:

Today and here in Europe

Racism spreads

You are getting ready to drive the poor

the disturbing strangers, and to send them back to their homeland’s hell. In short, this is a moment of acknowledged complicity – the filmmakers’ touch and that of the fascist colonialist, the television audience and the European lawmakers who turn back the refugees. Who is the the ‘barbarian’ here? Is it you? Is it me? Us?

I don’t’ have enough time here (and when I read this at the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference) to do justice to the two other works that you and Angela presented at documenta 14. Your 1986 film Return to Khodorciur–Armenian Diary at the Benaki Museum—Pireos Street Annexe in Athens or your expansive installation Journey to Russia (1989–2017) in the basement of the Neue Galerie in Kassel. All I can say is that in each work you articulate a different relationship between mundane life and historical tragedy, the past and the present, here and elsewhere, through your hand, touch and gesture and the creation of film and drawing and their effect on the audience. Speaking of audience, I have a deep regret that I didn’t spend more time with these works when I had the opportunity, especially the installation. I now pore over the publication of excerpts from your and Angela’s diary The Arrow of Time: Notes from a Russian Journey 1989-1990 (Humboldt Books, 2017), in search of its traces. Maybe it is my interest television (last year, in my new department, I taught a course on television for the first time) and the Public TV program of documenta 14 in particular, but one of my favorite drawings by Angela from the book is of Fred Astaire dancing on TV during a dinner you had in Leningrad. Well, it Angela’s words as much as the image, which I will repeat here:

On the table, set for dinner, to our great amazement, a smiling Fred Astaire appears, dancing away. In the middle of the cups, teapots and sweets. He’s just part of it all.

Can the same be said of the appearance of the racist hands of colonial violence, reaching out from fascist found footage, that appeared across a dinner table, after midnight in Greece in the

summer of 2017 (or on a screen anywhere via the German version on YouTube)? Is he ‘just part of it all’ too? Well, tomorrow will be my last post. Where we will finally get to fascism – then and now – and, yes you guessed it, to Benito Mussolini and (whisper it here, into a hole) our own barbaric president, Donald Trump.

Until then!

Richard

DAY 5 Dear Yervant, This will be my last post to and for you. As I reach this point in tomorrow’s presentation to the audience of the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference, I am sure that I will be running out of time and the moderator will either have already or be about to hold up the ‘5 minutes left’ card. It is a shame that I have given myself so little time to address the main issue at hand, but there isn’t much I can do about that now. Tempus fugit (or as I once wrote, when I was a Classicist), Tempus refugit.

So let me get straight down to the point. After seeing his dead body revived into the prancing fascist colonialist leader, around 38 minutes into your hour-long film, you read Mussolini’s words, from a telegram:

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Green light for the use of gas

for higher reasons of national defense

To destroy the rebels

Use gas

I explicitly authorize:

Politics of terrors And extinction of rebels as well as allied villages.â&#x20AC;?

I considered calling this sequence of blogposts Telegrams from a Barbarian Land in direct reference to this pivotal moment in Pays Barbare, because it was this ventriloquism of Il Duce that grounded my argument about the fascism of today, especially as manifested in the administration of the white supremacist President of the United States. While the telegram has been superseded in his hands by the Tweet (or extended form in the Executive Order), the authoritarian call to neocolonial violence remains. Yet, as your film carefully demonstrates and the theorist and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi clearly articulates, “fascism will never reappear in the historical form we knew in the twentieth century” (‘Dynamics of Humiliation and Postmodern Fascism’, in A New Fascism? ed. Susanne Pfeffer, 2018). What is happening, however, is (and again allow me to quote Berardi), “that we are now approaching the showdown of five hundred years of Western colonialism and of the white race’s domination of our planet.”

For precisely this reason, I interpret your decision to follow the chilling words of Mussoliniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s necropolitical directive with Angelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s speaking and then singing of King Haile Selassieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appeal to the League of Nations in summer 1936, as an explicitly contemporary challenge to white supremacist terrorism from the position of the Global South. This is a decolonial act of witnessing to the ongoing effects of colonial violence, on lands, on water, on bodies, on the burning of eyes and gasping for breath, wherein those who see the suffering (like you, the artists), are in stark contrast to the unknowing and detached Italian pilots who carry out the acts of terror as ordered by their commander in chief.

Here no screengrab will do, instead we need to see and hear the word ‘Gas’, not in your whispered quotation from Mussolini’s directive, but in the held breath of Angela’s singing voice (go to 42:30 in the video below):

It is on this note, this breath, that I must end.

Of course, your film continues. There are more words, spoken and sung, more words quoted, of Mussolini, as well as other corrective words inserted by you and Angela. There are more images of people and their violence, their destruction, more images of that ‘horrible normalcy’ in the ending sequence of you holding photographs before the camera. All these words and images culminate in the definitive pronouncement that ‘every epoch has its fascism’, followed by the only Italian spoken in the whole film, coming from another voice, another time.

I also know that there is more to be said for the audience here at the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference and for this panel on Colonial and Fascist Cinema, in relation to Gianmarco Mancosu’s paper you just heard and that of Pietro Bianchi you are waiting to hear. More on what Ruth Ben-Ghiat has called the ‘Empire Cinema’ of Italian Fascism, as well as Robert Lumley’s description of Mussolini in your films as a ‘mnemonic that reminds spectators of politics and history’. But I want to end with Angela’s voice because it is the voice of all who suffer and how that suffering is both magnified and distilled by artists like yourself, because you hear them. Voices like those of Monique Verdin, who i heard speak after a screening of her heartbreaking film My Louisana Love about her family and the Houma Nation, and their battles with big oil and its

devastation of their land. Voices like Manthia Diawara whose Opera of the World joined Pays Barbare at midnight on a television screen in Greece in 2017 and will be shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts this coming May.

Maybe one day you will come to visit us here in Columbus, Ohio and you will get to hear your voice and you will see at close proximity the impact of your work in naming and shaming neofascism and neocolonialism, from the shores of the Mediterranean to US-Mexico border in this our Barbarian Land.

With love and gratitude,

Richard