Beauty and Terror

The political inheritance of colonialism and fascism in Italy is now being reframed on the one hand by the dramatic return in recent years of populist ultranationalism in Europe as well as in the Americas, and, on the other, by the far-reaching impact of the Black Lives Matter movement — together with the waves of contestation across broad geographies in relation to monuments in public space — drawing attention to forms of systematic exclusion and violence linked to white supremacy and patriarchy that have their roots in colonial occupation and slavery. In the essays commissioned for the second section of this volume, different critical perspectives are brought to bear on this contemporary nexus in Italy in relation to the European context. Political philosopher Elsa Dorlin points to the continuities between colonialism, fascism and neo-liberal governance, notably in the normalisation of the use of violence towards civilian populations. Elsewhere, she has coined the term 'necroliberalism' to describe the generalisation of violence linked to the extraction of profit. [vi] She underlines here the importance of protest and civil disobedience in situations of state violence and structural injustice, noting, in the case of contemporary France, that demonstration and other means of expressing dissent are increasingly being criminalised. Social science researcher and activist Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’ and artist Justin Randolph Thompson – who is also the co-founder of Black History Month Florence and The Recovery Plan [vii] – address forms of structural violence perpetrated by institutions of the state, and historical blindness in relation to movements of people across the Mediterranean towards the centres of imperial power that have rendered their homelands unliveable. They speak to the defence mechanisms deployed to protect interests vested in the existing order of things, such as the appeal to universal, 'consensual', values and to 'necessary measures' for ensuring security. Art historian Alessandro Galicchio analyses Italian amnesia in the face of histories of colonial violence in the eastern Mediterranean, with reference particularly to Albania and its pavilion at the Mostra d'Oltremare (the current, shortened appellation for the remaining parts of the exhibition grounds that Mussolini created, which are today administered as spaces for commercial exhibitions and leisure). He unpacks the racial thinking underlying the insistence on Roman archaeological heritage in Albania to 'Italianise' the white population, so that their lands could be labelled Italian 'possessions' (in distinction to the 'colonies' in Africa where black people live).

Many critical thinkers have traced connections between the extreme violence of colonialism and that of fascism. In his landmark text Discourse on colonialism (1950), poet and essayist Aimé Césaire points to the manner in which National Socialism applied in Europe a scope of violence that had previously been reserved for the colonies, an analysis that political philosopher Hannah Arendt expands in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). [viii] In effect, the Second World War translated to the framework of European fascism the extreme violence with impunity practised on slave plantations and in the colonies, as underlined by contemporary political philosopher Achille Mbembe in his influential essay 'Necropolitics' (2003), arguing that 'in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law' and 'where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilisation'. [ix] Life, land and resources can be freely taken, as the humanity and sovereignty of the inhabitants of colonised territories are not politically or legally recognised. [x] Other important thinkers on European imperialism, such as Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, have for this reason insisted not only on the physical but also of the psychological dimensions of colonialism. [xi] Strong parallels can be drawn today with the treatment of 'economic migrants', exiles from previously colonised areas, and their experiences of detention and exploitation. Artist Binta Diaw points to this correlation in her installation Nero Sangue(2020-2022) which juxtaposes a pile of black-painted tomatoes with suspended, semi-transparent cotton banners onto which she has faintly transferred the faces of black men and women from photographs that appeared in the magazines La difesa della razza (The defence of the race) and Tempo, both subsidised by the Fascist regime. Racial laws were introduced in Italy in 1938 and the Race Manifesto of that year announced the existence of a pure 'Italian race'. Diaw reworks the original images through her delicate, hand-made transfers, a process of withdrawing these people from the dehumanising context in which they had been represented; she then turns the viewer’s attention towards the continuities that can be found in the contemptuous and often violent treatment suffered by black people, many of them exiles without legal documents, who slave under the hot sun in the tomato fields of southern Italy. The work references the justifications for colonial expropriation laid out through the invention of 'racial sciences' in Europe, running in parallel to the affirmation of a genealogy traced to Greek and Roman antiquity in the development of European Humanism —which cloaks under its ideology of universalism the reality of the exclusion of most of humanity from its protections and rights. Departing from little-discussed events, architectures, archival materials, stories and situations, Diaw and other artists in Beauty and Terror address in varying ways the imposition of regimes of economic and political control over the south by the north from the period of Italian fascism and colonialism to the present, as well as how scientific and aesthetic apparatuses are pressed into service to reinforce and justify these regimes of control.

In her work L’Incoronazione della Vergine tra angeli e santi (Coronation of the Virgin amidst angels and saints, 2022), Giulia Piscitelli creates an overlay on maps of Italian East Africa published by the Consociazione Turistica Italiana (Italian Tourism Association) in 1938 under the Fascist colonial Empire, producing a cartography of gold leaf halos, calling to mind the long history of Christianity in the Horn of Africa, dating back to the fourth century AD in the Kingdom of Axum. Beyond their religious, auratic associations, the gold halos also evoke military targets and the extraction of wealth during the period of Italian imperial domination[xii]; in her related group of paintings Terra, sistema periodico #1-#6 (Earth, periodic table #1-#6, 2022), Piscitelli uses pigments containing minerals present in Eritrean and Ethiopian soil. [xiii] Theo Eshetu’s video installation The return of the Axum obelisk (2009) visually recounts the story of the return of a historical stele to Axum in Ethiopia that had been stolen by representatives of the Italian Fascist government and shipped in pieces, arriving in Naples in 1937 before being reassembled and erected in Porta Capena Square in Rome in front of the Ministry of the Colonies. Ethiopian demands for restitution of the stele continued for over half a century before this important piece of cultural heritage was finally returned in 2005 and then reinstalled in Axum in 2008 after restoration. Nidhal Chamekh’s large drawing installed on scaffolding, Et si Carthage? #1 (2023), brings together fragments of images and text relating the story of the stele of Axum alongside another object stolen by Italian invading forces that had arrived in Naples together with it in 1937, a monument to the Lion of Judah (symbolizing the Ethiopian Emperors) that was put on display outside Termini Station in Rome. The monument returned to Ethiopia in response to petitions for restitution and re-installed by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1971 — in its original location outside the France-Ethiopian Railway Company building in Addis Ababa. Faced with the long history of the looting of obelisks and other sculptures from North Africa for the glorification of European colonial regimes and the naturalisation of their imperial power, Chamekh seeks to translate, in his assemblages of heterogeneous elements, the dissonances, discontinuities and hybridisations that they contain. [xiv] He is interested in how images, whether historical or current, are not static, but are rather constantly redefining and redeploying themselves across visual culture, literature, the natural and human sciences and other fields. While generally this redeployment acts to underpin and reinforce existing historical and political tropes, there is also a potential for this montage process to contribute to rethinking and reactivating otherwise the past in the present.

Returning to the Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare , the selection of Naples, and of the specific site in the working-class area of Fuorigrotta, also had another motivation, that of kick-starting a social, urban and economic renewal of the city to offer 'the best solution to the complex Neapolitan problem'. [xv] The Documentario brochure proclaims that the Mostra'is not a museum of dead things or a mercantile exhibition or a colossal fair: it is rather the greatest work that imperial Naples offers to Italy and to itself'. [xvi] Covering an area of around a square kilometre, the architect-designed complex featured 36 pavilions, offices, an open-air arena that could accommodate more than 10,000 people, two theatres, an Olympic swimming pool, a zoo and a tropical aquarium. It was intended to be a motor for economic development and a vector of social transformation in this capital of the south that had spiralled down from its past status as a cosmopolitan centre of learning, commerce and the arts due to high unemployment rates and deeply rooted organised crime, raising the spectre of the 'southern question' that emerged after Italian unification of how to address economic 'backwardness', poverty and criminality in the south of the country. The inhabitants of southern Italy were sometimes referred to as Africans by their northern counterparts, mobilizing an imaginary of the 'uncivilised' or 'primitive' with a long history; from the second half of the sixteenth century, Jesuits returning from South America to carry out missionary activities in the Kingdom of Naples had referred to the south as the 'Italian Indes' and to southerners as 'the Indians from around here'. [xvii] Mussolini was intent on smoothing the divide between north and south; the notion of 'one Italy' had formed part of nationalist Fascist rhetoric since the 1920s. Another benefit of empire, from Mussolini’s perspective, was to consolidate a unified Italian identity. By the 1930s, he declared that the 'southern question' was solved, as Ethiopians rather than southerners were threatening the Italian nation and its imperial greatness through their continuing guerrilla resistance. [xviii] The Fascist regime manifestly racialised and dehumanised Ethiopians to justify their colonial aspirations and military offensive. Interestingly, they also tried to use religious differences within Ethiopia to divide the resistance, with Mussolini promising that he, unlike Haile Selassie’s Orthodox Christian regime, would protect and provide space for Muslims in the colonial territory and proclaiming in 1937 that Italy 'will always be the friend and protector of Islam'. [xix] Ethiopian resistance fighters continued to wage war on the ground throughout the Italian reign of terror – which included widespread sexual slavery and violence to women. [xx] Rossella Biscotti’s Note su Zeret (Notes on Zeret, 2014-2015) records through photographs and risograph prints the artist’s visit to the site of a massacre carried out by the Italian army between 9 and 11 April 1939 in which around 2000 people living in the Zeret cave in the Manz region north of Addis Ababa were killed. The large cave complex, in which members of the resistance had taken refuge, was home to women, men and children and featured granaries, cooking areas, storage jars and baskets for winnowing. [xxi] The Italian army threw bombs filled with mustard gas into the cave and then executed by machine gun those who surrendered or tried to escape the gas, with just a handful of people surviving. [xxii] It was only in 2006 that information on the massacre was published for the first time in Italy by historian Matteo Dominioni and this history is still not widely known or discussed. [xxiii] Biscotti was taken to the cave by descendants of survivors and other local community members who expressed their wish that the story of the massacre be more widely told. Later research initiated by the artist suggests that the mustard gas used may have been shipped from the military base in Naples.

The massacre at Zeret took place a year and a month before the opening of Mussolini’s great colonial exhibition that was designed to show the results of 'Italian genius, valour and labour in the lands beyond the seas' on 9 May 1940. Within the Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare , the pavilion for Africa Orientale Italiana included sections for each of the six administrative areas of the empire — Amara, Eritrea, Harar, Galla e Sidamo, Scioa e Somalia — each divided into three sections: the physical/natural environment, ethnicity and history, and colonisation. [xxiv] A special entrance hall had been constructed called the Cubo d’Oro, or Golden Cube, of which the outside mosaic relief decoration took inspiration from the architectures of Axum. Inside, the Salone dell’Impero , the Empire Salon, featured two enormous frescoes by Giovanni Brancaccio facing each other across the space in the centre of which was a mosaic globe showing the spread of Italians around the world. The frescoes, which still exist in a degraded state, feature Julius Caesar on one side and Mussolini on the other, each seated on a horse with their armies massed around them. [xxv] The nearby area outside was designated for the 'indigenous villages' and other buildings in the vernacular architectural styles of the colonial territories, including a Coptic church and a mosque, as described in this review:

Alongside the Mostra d’A.O.I [pavilion of Italian East Africa] stands the area of the indigenous villages, which presents to the public a reconstruction of the most typical forms of habitation in the territories of the Empire: among the tamarinds, ferns, junipers and acacias, the tents of the nomads rise up; dwellings of the tukul ambara and hudmò of the high planes follow; the beehive-huts of the sedentary Cunama, built of dung and clay, almost touch the light tents of the Danakili; a few Galla huts, a typical Sidamo habitation, a group of circular Somali constructions and the small mosque complete the picture of ethnic diversity, over which the substantial ghebi of the Amhara chief and the characteristic architecture of the Coptic church dominate. [xxvi]

In the landscape of diversity that had been assembled, the apogee was formed by a recreation of Emperor Fasilides baths in Gondar, the capital he founded in the 1630s (Fasilides is the Amhara chief to whom the review refers). The stone edifice and the lake into which it dips its feet evoke the Grand Tour taste for the ruins of earlier civilisations overrun by nature. Here also are the vignettes of the local inhabitants who live alongside the ruins of past grandeur, but can never be the subjects of the grand historical narratives that the stones record — and whose land thus passes naturally into the hands of an imperial power destined to write History. Fifty-eight people — 17 women, 7 children and the rest men, including Orthodox and other Christians as well as Muslims — were transported from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea to represent different areas of the empire and figure in the landscape as living exhibits in a human zoo within the 'indigenous villages'. [xxvii] Photoreporter Federico Patellani took numerous photographs of them during the exhibition for the magazine Tempo. When Italy entered World War II and the exhibition closed, they were unable to return home and would remain confined for years in the spaces of the Mostra d'Oltremare suffering from hunger and cold, as well as the terror of allied bombings. Some of them were employed in film on a number of occasions, the strangest perhaps being in November 1942 when they were all escorted by police to lodgings in Frascati near Rome for a month, at the request of Cines production company working at the Cinecittà studios, in order to appear in the propaganda film Harlem directed by Carmine Gallone, the plot of which centres on an Italian-American boxer who beats his Abyssinian opponent in 1930s New York. [xxviii] In April 1942, the group was finally transferred to a former women's internment camp in Treia, from which the Jewish, British, French and Yugoslavian prisoners had been evacuated due to the camp's poor hygienic conditions. In another twist, some are known to have escaped to join an international band of anti-fascist partisans. [xxix] It was not until after the war, in the period from late 1945 to mid-1946, that most of the Eritreans, Somalians and Ethiopians were able to return home. [xxx]

In relation to this story and in particular to the photographs of Patellani, curator Sarah Bushra and dancer/choreographer Dawit Seeto conceived a response to the violence captured in and enacted by the photographs, a performance and spoken word piece entitled ከገፅታውበስተጀርባ; Look Here. Working with embodied gestures that draw on the language of traditional dances in Ethiopia, using the 'Movement Vocab methodology' they developed together in past work, they chose five photographs to explore how gestures may provide an entry point for the encounter with the palpable violence that the photographs record and perpetrate. Artist Délio Jasse similarly considers the violence of photographic images in the colonial context, particularly focussing on analysing European colonists’ self-representation, notably in family photographs and other vernacular images. For his workshop activating the Beauty and Terror exhibition space in Naples, he and the participants worked with images from different sources, including reportage shots taken by Neapolitan photographer and filmmaker Roberto Troncone of farming families from the south of Italy waiting on the port to embark for Libya. He turned his lens on these modest people to document their departure for the promised new life in the colonies: a woman breastfeeding her baby, others struggling to carry chickens with them in baskets, families all dressed in their best clothes. [xxxi] In their major project Ente di Decolonizzazione - Borgo Rizza (2022 - ongoing), DAAR – the platform created by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti that is situated between architecture, art, pedagogy and politics – investigates the violent architectures of the internal colonisation of Sicily by the fascist regime, which in 1940 created the the 'Entity of Colonization of the Sicilian Latifundium', on the basis of a similar 'Entity' in Libya. Eight new small rural townships were created in different areas of Sicily that were considered empty and underdeveloped, each featuring the key buildings necessary for the new model settlements in stark, rationalist architecture. DAAR scaled down elements of the architecture of one of these rural towns created to kick-start agricultural production, Borgo Rizza, to human sized modules. The mobile modules are exhibited but also activated to create spaces for discussion and debate, particularly in relation to how the violent heritage of fascism and colonialism may be digested and transformed to generate new possibilities and vocabularies. The first activation was held outdoors at the Mostra d’Oltremare in early May 2022, exactly 82 years after Mussolini opened in these same spaces his grand orchestration of an experiential device for awakening the Italian masses to their predestined imperial privilege.

Today fascist dynamics are moving to the core of political life over wide geographies. In Late Fascism: Race, capitalism and the politics of crisis (2023), critical social theorist Alberto Toscano points to how today's global far-right is stirring up panic about threats to longstanding geopolitical, gendered and racial regimes. [xxxii] Art historian and political theorist, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen notes in his Late Capitalist Fascism (2021) that contemporary fascism is more to do with the violence of bordering Europe and the United States and much less to do with ambitious infrastructure projects, experiments in new social forms and territorial expansionism than fascism last century. It looks less to the future and is widely characterised by a flattening or emptying out of politics and by the valorisation of ties to land, aspiring to build an imagined organic community through the exclusion of foreigners and non-white people, or their consignment without political and juridical rights to zones of control and violence. [xxxiii] Under the current Italian government of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and her party Fratelli D'Italia, the political focus on border control has increased exponentially. Since taking office in 2022, Georgia Meloni has travelled repeatedly to neighbouring countries around the Mediterranean, including Tunisia, Libya and Albania, specifically to discuss Italy’s financial support of reinforced regimes of control of would-be migrants outside of Europe’s borders. At the time of her party's electoral victory, she announced her desire to put up a 'naval blockade' to stop arrivals by sea; in reality this work has been outsourced to other governments who have received Italian and European funding to detain would be migrants in camps and deport them. In the case of Kais Saied's regime in Tunisia, it has been documented this has in fact frequently involved transporting black people to desert areas and abandoning them. [xxxiv]

Alongside these political and economic orientations, the lessons of Mussolini’s regime in regards to the potential to promulgate government policy laterally through broad-public exhibitions have not been lost on the current government. In 2023, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome paid tribute to one of Georgia Meloni’s favourite authors, J.R.R Tolkien, with an exhibition, conceived (and supported to the tune of €250,000) by the Ministry of Culture, Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore, timed to take place fifty years after the Italian publication of The Hobbit. [xxxv] A review of the exhibition notes that the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement ‘quite consciously adopted the language and symbolism of Tolkien’s world to replace its own disgraced ideological aesthetic: swastikas were out, and Celtic crosses were in’. [xxxvi] Tolkien-themed youth festivals called Camp Hobbit were held from the late 1970s[xxxvii], and, as a member of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI, one of the organisers of Campo Hobbit), Meloni herself also dressed up as a hobbit to deliver talks to schoolchildren. Tolkein’s elves, wizards, dwarves and hobbits hold a deep fascination for the far right in Italy as expressions of 'indigenous' connections to land, fighting to save their magical forests, their mountain halls filled with gold, their picturesque Shire, their culture and traditions, from the massed minions of the Dark Lord. With the exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale, this story is circulated to the show’s large audiences as a parable for our times.