JOURNAL #08
– December 2018 Insights Issue – Bel Suol d’Amore –
Bel Suol d’Amore: Research on Subjective Terrain by Leone Contini [Excerpt from: Hamm, Marion and Klaus Schönberger (eds). 2019 (forthcoming). Contentious heritages and arts: A critical companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag.]
e research frame of the exhibition Bel Suol d’Amore – e Scattered Colonial Body (25.06 / 9.07.2017, Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini”, Rome), is stretched in space and time: from Tarhuna and Tripoli (in Libya) to Florence and Rome, from the early 30s to nowadays. e trigger of this project was the unexpected discovery of a former colonial museum in Rome, whose “body” got dispersed in different locations, and the accidental encounter with the Italian-Libyan community in Rome. But its backstory is the resettlement of my great-grandparents from Sicily to Libya in the 30s, where my mother was born in 1948. e presence of Arnd Schneider, professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo, gave strength and continuity to our research, defining the institutional frame of the fieldwork but also creating non-institutional occasions of meetings with the Italian Libyans in Rome. Our interaction worked on a very daily level: the co-creation of a common discourse via the constant dialogic interaction shaped both our research to the same extent as it shaped the tangible forms of the material outcome: the final exhibition. Interaction with the museum Pigorini was complex despite its full institutional and scientific support. Whilst a core of museum staff were very supportive, some other scientific and technical staff perceived our presence as an intrusion. I o en experienced this attitude while working with Italian public (but not only) institutions. I think that my hybrid and inter-disciplinary profile potentially contributes to intensifying such hostility, my role being perceived as not clear and easily misunderstood. My anthropologist research partner contributed to re-sewing the working frame in such occasions. Our fieldwork intersected with very private aspects of my live, such as my family relations and archives in Florence, but mainly articulated with various locations in the city of Rome: Museums (in most cases their storage areas,
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corridors or offices), private homes and gathering areas for the meetings of the Italian-Libyans based in the Italian capital, a Jewish-Tripolitan restaurant and an Arabic-Libyan one. I chased the remains of the extinguished African museum and the ghost of Italian colonialism on a very heterogeneous terrain: with some of its inhabitants I experienced affinity, with many others mutual distance. e research process was complex and o en put me in unbearable positions: the fact that I descend from Italian colonizers made my presence on the field non-neutral, for example regarding my relationship with the Italian-Libyans community: I was somehow potentially considered as part of their community, despite my family narrations concerning Libya were o en antithetic to theirs ones. I especially felt uncomfortable with un-reflexive and nostalgic understanding of the role played by the Italians in the former colony. At the same time their stories were familiar to me, able to evocate intense memories of my grandparents and great grandparents. My investigation about couscous recipes dangerously reduced our distance, together with the fact that I empathized with those among them who experienced deportation and painful experiences of displacement and racist exclusion—being o en Southern Italians and generically perceived as Africans—once they landed in Italy, a er their expulsion by Gaddafi in 1969-1970. e production of the exhibition became the occasion to represent this contradictory complexity without giving up my critical perspective—in other terms it strategically helped me to gain back my distance, and my agency. e ambition of the whole project is to dismantle the ideological apparatus of colonialism, driving it out from inside the western gaze, while fully acknowledging its incongruent dimensions and intrinsic complexity. ×
The project Bel Suol d’Amore is the result of a collaboration between the artist Leone Contini and anthropologist Arnd Schneider within the research project TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the arts. Arnd Schneider is professor of social anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology of University of Oslo. Leone Contini studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at Siena University. His research, on the edge between ethnography and art, is focused on intercultural frictions, confl ict and power relations. His mediums include Installations, lecture-performances, interventions in public space, writing, drawing and audio-visual narratives.
The TRACES Journal includes 9 issues, available for free download at www.traces.polimi.it/journal
“Union and Progress” in Italian and Arabic, and a palm. Emblem of the “Associazione per il Progresso della Libia” (Assotiation for the Progress of Libya), an inter-religious and inter-ethnic association founded by pro-Arab and anti-imperialist Italians, whose motto was “Libya to the Libyans”. Among them was the Italian Valentino Parlato, (Tripoli, 07.02.1931 – Rome, 02.05.2017), expelled from Libya in 1951 by the British administration, and founder of the Italian leftist magazine Il Manifesto. Image print on the booklet Associazione Politica per il progresso della Libia: Statuto, from Contini’s family archive. (cover photo)
The Scattered Colonial Body by Leone Contini [Excerpt from: Hamm, Marion and Klaus Schönberger (eds). 2019 (forthcoming). Contentious heritages and arts: A critical companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag.]
e keystone of the exhibition Bel Suol d’Amore is an interview with my grandmother, video recorded in 2002 and digitalized during our fieldwork in Rome in 2017 (available at https://vimeo.com/237287127). My grandmother, born in 1914, witnessed pre-war events, that the elders among today’s Italian-Libyans in Rome cannot remember: vibrant memories and family anecdotes cohabit with horrific ones, such as the beheaded heads of the Arab leaders exposed as trophies in Tarhuna by the Italian “killer” (her words) Piscopello. e “civilizing mission” of Europe is bordering barbarism, more or less explicitly, in all her tales, from the bloody fascist era to the de facto apartheid of the post war period. e ironic perspective of this young woman with a socialist background dominates the exhibition designed by her grandson, me: while sitting in front of her image on the screen, watching the interview, it is in fact possible to see (and therefore comprehend) the entire show. Laying on a table near her interview several couscous recipes, collected during the research process. ese are available for the audience to take away: each one recalls a different component of the contradictory colonial patchwork. is collection, on the crossroad between ethnography and fiction, is a sort of hypothesis for creolization. On the opposite corner of the same table there is another video, A Tripoli (To Tripoli): a collection of key events which occurred during our fieldwork in Rome. Right on the le of the video a showcase displays, as in a Wunderkammer, various objects that several Italian-Libyan families (including mine) were able to
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Project: Bel Suol d’Amore – The Scattered Colonial Body Site: Rome (including work with museum staff, and Libyan Italian colonial settlers) Institutions: Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini” Team: Leone Contini (artist), Arnd Schneider (anthropologist, curator); collaborative partners at the Museum: Loretta Paderni, Rossana di Lella
take to Italy (these objects are rare because the Italians were not allowed to bring more then a suitcase with them). A multilingual phone-book of Tripoli from the 1950s paradoxically evocates an utopian city (of the future?), where different religions and faiths cohabit. Such polyphony, albeit based on uneven power relations, have totally disappeared from Tripoli only a few years later. ese elements of the show are surrounded by and somehow visually connected with one another by ephemeral palm trees made out of paper. Palms are in my perspective polyvalent keys able to access different realms of the colonial microcosm, being used by very different sides, from the Italian fascists to the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya of Muammar Gaddafi, but also by a very unknown pro-Arab Italian movement from the 1950s and also by the Italian-Libyan association in Rome, whose logo displays an eradicated palm on a boat.
Unveiling Sabratha, Rome 2018. Still from the video A Tripoli (Leone Contini, 2017. Available at: https://vimeo.com/226141793). This model represents my first encounter with the “scattered body” of the dismissed African Museum in Rome.
I decided to keep another series of objects somehow isolated, distant from “our” family collections, and from my grandmother’s interview: the bronze busts of several “actors” of the colonial drama: from the Italian King and Emperor to General Graziani, a war criminal named “the butcher of Fezzan”. I felt the urge to bring these objects back to the public discourse, in order to reopen a neglected chapter of the Italian history, by following an anti-celebrative strategy of display: I showed them half wrapped in their packing, tied on pallets, lying on the floor and desecrated, as undigested remains of a collective crime. ×
The Intruder. Tripoli, early 1950s. My mother is the little, blond girl in the middle. The Arab boy in the background may seem to be an intruder and to ruin the picture. However, he is not the real intruder.
La Tripolina. Leone Contini, 2017. This double recipe was part of the Cuscus installation including a collection of couscous recipes coming from various Libyan-Italian families which embody the contradictory aspects of colonialism. The first recipe comes from the Calandra family, who was expelled from Libya in 1970. Among the few objects that Emma Calandra carried with her to Italy was a couscous pot. Once in Turin she was “exotically” named by her neighbours “la Tripolina” (the “Tripolitan woman”). All family members were perceived as southern Italian because they had Sicilian ancestors and were coming from Africa; as a consequence they experienced discrimination. Today Emma lives in Rome and can afford an elderly caretaker, Salamantu Korere, who comes from Africa and brought to Italy a new couscous recipe. Emma’s son, born in Libya, is an employee at the Pigorini Museum in Rome.
Colonial Hauntology by Giulia Grechi [Excerpt from: Salerno, Daniele and Patrizia Violi. 2019 (forthcoming). Migranti, Archivi, Patrimonio. Memorie pubbliche delle migrazioni. Bologna: Il Mulino.]
Some museums are haunted. Most ethnographic museums were born from colonial routes and their “bittersweet spoils” (Taussig 2005) made of genocide and looting. However, these museums o en remain silent about why those objects are there, how they were acquired, and what kind of knowledge has been historically constructed through their representation. Our cultural heritage that is preserved in museums, especially in ethnographic ones, is full of spectral traces of our colonial history, which continue to be invisible, forbidden, apparently irreconcilable. However, “spectrality is a form of life” (Agamben 2009, 62). If we listened to these spectral echoes, to their voices, if we could penetrate this “colonial hauntology” (Gregos, Meessen 2016, 10), perhaps we would be able to better understand the way in which many urgencies of our contemporaries, inside and out museums, are linked to this past that still torments the present, in its ghostly posthumous life. e museum and the archive, as devices and narratives of colonial origin, are crucial places from which it is possible to interrogate those phantoms that represent a “difficult memory” for Europe. It is about going beyond active forgetfulness, the “selective oblivion” (Ricoeur, 2004), the construction of exotic and patronizing imaginaries (like “Italians, good people”), which have dominated the strategies and policies of memorization with respect to our colonial past, and reshape our ethical and political expectations towards narratives closer to the diasporic quality of contemporary cultures. First of all, it is about reopening archives and critically interrogating them. Inside the Pigorini Museum, Leone Contini has created a complex, transmedia installation suspended between the intimacy of family stories and the institutional narrative embedded in the objects of the museum collections, which were re-told in a critical and sometimes ironic manner. e video A Tripoli (To Tripoli) takes its title from a famous fascist propaganda song, Bel suol d’amore, also called A Tripoli, and shows a series of situations, meetings and moments collected during the preparatory research period of the installation. Rather than just documenting the process, the video highlights how
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much the installation is the result not only of an artist’s research but also of coincidences, of the meetings that took place during the months prior to the opening, which o en oriented the research in an unexpected though productive manner. During the research process, the history of the museum’s heritage came across the artist’s personal history, which, like many other Italian family stories, extends outside the borders of one nation. us, for
example, during a preliminary survey in the museum archives, the artist stumbled upon a model of Sabratha, an archaeological site in Libya in which his grandfather, an archaeologist, had worked. Many intimate memories and stories of Italian colonialism o en overlap in unpredictable ways with public memories, with History. Complex affections that, faced with the historical judgment of colonialism, do not cease to express themselves because the tie is intimate; it is the place where personal or family identity intertwine with that “Italianness” which is so difficult to define. e colonial question is not just about historiography; it affects people’s daily lives, their beloved ones, their consumption, their identification processes, their intimate and cultural memories. It is by penetrating the territories of domesticity and the broad articulation of contradictory affections (from guilt to shame and nostalgia) that we can transform the postcolonial debate into something tangible because that is the place where popular memories and archival practices meet, where Reflections, Rome 2017. Here I am with an employee of the “Luigi Pigorini” museum, born in Libya, during the opening of Bel Suol d’Amore exhibition. Photo by C. Delnevo.
Installation view of the Bel Suol d’Amore exhibition, “Luigi Pigorini” museum, Rome 2017. Some uncanny remains of the former African Museum in Rome: the war criminal General Rodolfo Graziani, responsible for mass deportations and killing of civilians, both in Libya and Ethiopia. His bronze cast was displayed on the floor, half packed, desecrated, as an attempt to break through the colonial amnesia, without celebrating its actors.
people elaborate the narratives that give meaning to their life and history. It is in front of that model of Sabratha, covered with a cloth in the archives of the museum, that ignited the “serendipity” which shi ed and addressed the artist’s research work at the Pigorini Museum, following the traces of Italian colonialism as in an investigation process. e model is part of the heritage of the former African Colonial Museum in Rome. Closed for many years, over time its collection was scattered in several other places such as the Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Infantry and the National Library, thus becoming a sort of uncomfortable legacy, a dispersed body, “a sort of ‘undigested’ remains hidden in basements or locked in the archives.” How to bring this dismembered and orphaned body, hidden and inaccessible, back to light, out of the archives and into public discourse? In the video A Tripoli, a close-up shows the hands of Leone and Tina Gaudino, a museum employee, born in Tripoli, who repair a small metal palm, presum-
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ably made by Tina’s father in the 1950s, for the artist’s mother. Once again this is a discovery, a fortunate encounter of stories, “a dizzying proximity— citing Merleau-Ponty—between things, bodies and memories, which makes the process of memory itself an essentially political act, occupying space and the body, re-membering, trying to put together the missing pieces of our cultural identity” (Grechi, Gravano 2016, 42). erefore, the palm tree becomes in the eyes of the artist “a sort of polyvalent key, to access contradictory domains”: from the public icon of the Fascist Empire to the anti-colonial symbol of the “Union and Progress” Association, which includes Italian, Maltese and Libyans Jews, who allied with the Arab Communist Party against the English presence in Libya. e palm is also the “medium of an intimate reconnection across time and space” between two families and two stories, scattered in Tripoli, Rome and Florence, and the sign of other discoveries within the art world—such as the story of Italian artist Mario Schifano, born in Libya, whose work is probably linked to the artist’s family through the image of small domestic palms, as in his sculpture Per costruzione di oasi (For Oasis Construction), 1980. At the Pigorini Museum, Leone Contini re-constructs small palm-shaped paper sculptures, that are a sort of small ghostly evocations, which he calls Anemic Palms, “paper palms of an ephemeral empire”, while the small original metal palm is shown together with others objects and private documents of his family, in the display case Inner Libya. is represents a sort of small, where “stories” full of traces of “History”, removed from the museum display, are exposed. Nevertheless, this history is still present in its archives, like also in the attics and the drawers of many Italian, Libyan, and Italian-Libyan families and constitutes a whole historical and cultural heritage mostly ignored by institutions that could help us to understand that our identity is essentially transnational and “migrant”; the result of contaminations and translations that have contributed to shaping it and given it both words and imaginary. Moreover, these “stories” could help us to understand the “intimate” nature of colonial relations, “the logic of ‘coexistence’, the dynamics of intimacy and familiarity” (Mbembe 2005, 133), which existed during the colonial period despite the crime and violence typical of every occupation. ey have survived in the postcolonial period, making the narration even more complex and slippery, but also more interesting due to what they
Restolen, Leone Contini, 2017 (video stills).
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Giulia Grechi is associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at the School of Fine Arts of Naples, editor-in-chief of the on-line journal roots§routes and President of the cultural association Routes Agency – cura of contemporary arts, based in Rome.
can tell about us, our identity, based on their roots which have been constantly contaminated by difference and dislocation. e artist also works on other “sensitive” objects of our colonial museum heritage; not only busts portraying soldiers, regents and administrators of the Italian colonies, such as Rodolfo Graziani. is all constitutes “removed material”, with the double meaning of displaced from its original site (the old African Museum), and denied, made invisible, deliberately forgotten. Moreover, also facial masks collected by Italian anthropologists in Libya in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the signs which represent the epistemological violence that accompanied and justified colonial occupation. Among them, the artist recalls Lidio Cipriani, who became known for having signed the Manifesto of the Race. ese objects, like the busts, models, and artworks arriving at the Pigorini Museum from the Archive of the African Museum, generate discomfort since these objects are quite impossible to deal with due to the lack our national un-openness in handling from a critical point of view the difficult memories associated with them. ey are le , therefore, in the museum storage, in a state of limbo, a paradoxical state of being out of sight, of “institutional orphanage”. As ghosts, they are invisible and yet present—hidden in plain sight. According to Leone Contini, the only way to give substance to these spectral presences and to the story they encapsulate is to duplicate them, bringing to light their double in a uncanny way, like a formal interrogation, which requires us to explain the scientific arguments provided by the anthropological knowledge to racism and the violent objectification and dehumanization of the colonized. Today, the ethnographic museum is one of the main instruments called by ethical responsibility to respond to this request. e artist has chosen one of the masks of the museum, scanned and reproduced it with a 3D printer, during a process that lasted several weeks with the collaboration of a Neapolitan printer, who also has Libyan-Italian origins (“serendipity, again!”). e installation is called Restolen (Stolen Back) because it is about “stealing back from the museum something that was once stolen to a person; its features.” On the one hand, it is a re-enactment of the brutality of the historical appropriation of that face, of that person, and its transformation into a simulacrum. On the other hand, the artist describes how, in the process of reproducing the mask, something else emerged, as if the process had recalled and evoked the presence of the person behind the mask, giving it its body back, contesting and subverting the necrophilic power of the object that had transformed it into a musealized object. “ e face, floating in the digital void of the laptop screen, appeared to be alive again, in contrast with the deadly aura of the original plaster object.”
The egg in the cuscus, Rome 2018. Still from the video A Tripoli (Leone Contini, 2017, available at: https://vimeo.com/226141793).
As a consequence, the artist has chosen to exhibit a video of the entire 3D mask-making process. e 3D reproduction is displayed next to the original mask to avoid simply replicating the historical appropriation according to a new, technologically-advanced version. Restolen #2 becomes a sort of trap for the spectator. e “new” mask is exposed on the wall with a sensor that is able to detect the presence of someone near and starts shooting pictures, accompanied by a loud noise, thus “stealing” the visitor’s image without his/her permission. e artist reproduces, therefore, for a second time, the dynamics of appropriation—from which the title “re-stolen”—this time reversing the role of the subjects involved. We are the ones who, when “looking closely”, like well-disciplined anthropologists and museologists, become the object of the appropriative gaze of the same devices of identity construction we have used for centuries to objectify and belittle the Other. ×
Agamben, G. 2009. “Dell’utilità e degli inconvenienti del vivere fra spettri” in Nudità, Rome: Nottetempo. Del Boca, A. 2005. Italiani brava gente?, Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore. Gregos, K., Meessen, V. 2016. Personne et les autres, exhibition catalogue of the Belgian Pavillion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Grechi, G., Gravano, V. eds. 2016. Presente imperfetto. Eredità coloniali e immaginari razziali contemporanei, Milan: Mimesis. Mbembe, A. 2005. Postcolonialismo, Rome: Meltemi. Original edition 2000. On the Post-Colony, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ricoeur, P. 2004. Ricordare, dimenticare, perdonare, Bologna: Il Mulino.
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tives focusing on practices, innovative approaches and experimental research actions. ree issues per year: ‘Snapshots’, with graphic-based contributions raising questions and investigating practices; ‘Dialogues’, in which the topic unfolds through a semi-structured interview; and ‘Insights’, that expands the field of inquiry by means of theoretical and empirical critical thoughts.
Scientific Responsible Prof. Luca Basso Peressut Department of Architecture and Urban Studies Politecnico di Milano Editor-in-Chief Francesca Lanz Editorial Board Tal Adler, Julie Dawson, Marion Hamm, John Harries, Martin Krenn, Erica Lehrer, Sharon Macdonald, Suzana Milevska, Aisling O’Beirn, Alenka Pirman, Regina Römhild, Arnd Schneider, Karin Schneider, Klaus Schönberger, Roma Sendyka Editorial Staff Cristina F. Colombo Jacopo Leveratto Alessandra Galasso (editing and translations) Graphic Design Zetalab – Milano Contacts Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 26 20133 Milano – Italy www.traces.polimi.it infoTRACES@polimi.it
TRACES Journal ensues from the research project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 693857. For further information please visit www.tracesproject.eu The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
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traces is an independent quarterly peer-reviewed, nonprofit journal that brings together original contributions to explore emerging issues in the field of heritage and museum studies. Selected research papers published in a sixteen-page, custom-designed, off-set print, limited edition. Each issue investigates a specific topic from different perspec-