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JOURNAL #08 – December 2018 Insights Issue – Bel Suol d’Amore – 02 — 03 corridors or offi ces), private homes and gathering areas Bel Suol d’Amore: for the meetings of the Italian-Libyans based in the Ital- ian capital, a Jewish-Tripolitan restaurant and an Ara- Research on bic-Libyan one. I chased the remains of the extinguished African muse- um and the ghost of Italian colonialism on a very heter- The project Bel Suol d’Amore is the result of a collaboration between the artist Leone Contini Subjective Terrain ogeneous terrain: with some of its inhabitants I experi- and anthropologist Arnd Schneider within enced affi nity, with many others mutual distance. the research project TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the arts. by Leone Contini e research process was complex and o en put me in Arnd Schneider is professor of social unbearable positions: the fact that I descend from Ital- anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology of University of Oslo. [Excerpt from: Hamm, Marion and Klaus Schönberger (eds). 2019 (forthcoming). Contentious heritages and arts: ian colonizers made my presence on the fi eld non-neu- Leone Contini studied Philosophy and A critical companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag.] tral, for example regarding my relationship with the Cultural Anthropology at Siena University. His research, on the edge between ethnography e research frame of the exhibition Bel Suol d’Amore – e Scattered Colonial Italian-Libyans community: I was somehow potentially and art, is focused on intercultural frictions, Body (25.06 / 9.07.2017, Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografi co “Luigi Pig- considered as part of their community, despite my fam- confl ict and power relations. His mediums include Installations, lecture-performances, orini”, Rome), is stretched in space and time: from Tarhuna and Tripoli (in ily narrations concerning Libya were o en antithetic to interventions in public space, writing, drawing Libya) to Florence and Rome, from the early 30s to nowadays. theirs ones. I especially felt uncomfortable with un-re- and audio-visual narratives. e trigger of this project was the unexpected discovery of a former coloni- fl exive and nostalgic understanding of the role played by al museum in Rome, whose “body” got dispersed in diff erent locations, and the Italians in the former colony. At the same time their The TRACES Journal includes 9 issues, available the accidental encounter with the Italian-Libyan community in Rome. But its stories were familiar to me, able to evocate intense mem- for free download at www.traces.polimi.it/journal backstory is the resettlement of my great-grandparents from Sicily to Libya ories of my grandparents and great grandparents. My in- in the 30s, where my mother was born in 1948. vestigation about couscous recipes dangerously reduced e presence of Arnd Schneider, professor of anthropology at the University our distance, together with the fact that I empathized of Oslo, gave strength and continuity to our research, defi ning the institu- with those among them who experienced deportation tional frame of the fi eldwork but also creating non-institutional occasions and painful experiences of displacement and racist ex- of meetings with the Italian Libyans in Rome. Our interaction worked on a clusion—being o en Southern Italians and generically very daily level: the co-creation of a common discourse via the constant dia- perceived as Africans—once they landed in Italy, a er logic interaction shaped both our research to the same extent as it shaped the their expulsion by Gaddafi in 1969-1970. tangible forms of the material outcome: the fi nal exhibition. Interaction with e production of the exhibition became the occasion to the museum Pigorini was complex despite its full institutional and scientif- represent this contradictory complexity without giving ic support. Whilst a core of museum staff were very supportive, some other up my critical perspective—in other terms it strategical- scientifi c and technical staff perceived our presence as an intrusion. I o en ly helped me to gain back my distance, and my agency. experienced this attitude while working with Italian public (but not only) in- e ambition of the whole project is to dismantle the stitutions. I think that my hybrid and inter-disciplinary profi le potentially ideological apparatus of colonialism, driving it out from contributes to intensifying such hostility, my role being perceived as not clear inside the western gaze, while fully acknowledging its in- and easily misunderstood. My anthropologist research partner contributed congruent dimensions and intrinsic complexity. to re-sewing the working frame in such occasions. Our fi eldwork intersected with very private aspects of my live, such as my “Union and Progress” in Italian and Arabic, and a palm. Emblem of the “Associazione family relations and archives in Florence, but mainly articulated with various 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 locations in the city of Rome: Museums (in most cases their storage areas, 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) 04 — 05 Project: Bel Suol d’Amore – The Scattered Colonial Body Site: Rome (including work with museum sta , and Libyan Italian colonial settlers) Institutions: Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografi co “Luigi Pigorini” Team: Leone Contini (artist), Arnd Schneider (anthropologist, curator); collaborative partners at the The Museum: Loretta Paderni, Rossana di Lella 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 grand- mother, video recorded in 2002 and digitalized during our fi eldwork 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 horrifi c ones, such as the beheaded heads of the Arab leaders exposed as trophies in Tarhuna by the Italian “killer” (her words) Piscopello. e “civi- lizing 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 take to Italy (these objects are rare because the Italians were not allowed to war period. e ironic perspective of this young woman with a socialist back- bring more then a suitcase with them). A multilingual phone-book of Tripoli ground dominates the exhibition designed by her grandson, me: while sitting from the 1950s paradoxically evocates an utopian city (of the future?), where in front of her image on the screen, watching the interview, it is in fact pos- diff erent religions and faiths cohabit. Such polyphony, albeit based on une- sible to see (and therefore comprehend) the entire show. Laying on a table ven power relations, have totally disappeared from Tripoli only a few years near her interview several couscous recipes, collected during the research later. process. ese are available for the audience to take away: each one recalls a ese elements of the show are surrounded by and somehow visually con- diff erent component of the contradictory colonial patchwork. is collection, nected with one another by ephemeral palm trees made out of paper. Palms on the crossroad between ethnography and fi ction, is a sort of hypothesis for are in my perspective polyvalent keys able to access diff erent realms of the creolization. On the opposite corner of the same table there is another video, colonial microcosm, being used by very diff erent sides, from the Italian fas- A Tripoli (To Tripoli): a collection of key events which occurred during our cists to the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya of Muammar Gaddafi , fi eldwork in Rome. but also by a very unknown pro-Arab Italian movement from the 1950s and Right on the le of the video a showcase displays, as in a Wunderkammer, var- also by the Italian-Libyan association in Rome, whose logo displays an eradi- ious objects that several Italian-Libyan families (including mine) were able to cated 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 fi rst 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 Em- peror 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-cel- ebrative strategy of display: I showed them half wrapped in their packing, tied on pallets, lying on the fl oor and desecrated, as undigested remains of a collective crime. La Tripolina. Leone Contini, 2017. The Intruder. Tripoli, early 1950s. This double recipe was part of the Cuscus installation including My mother is the little, blond girl in the middle. a collection of couscous recipes coming from various Libyan-Italian The Arab boy in the background may seem to be families which embody the contradictory aspects of colonialism.