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 oœ 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 oœ 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 oœ 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, aœ 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 oœ 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 leœ 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. an intruder and to ruin the picture. However, he The fi rst recipe comes from the Calandra family, who was expelled is not the real intruder. 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 a ord 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. 08 — 09

much the installation is the result not only of an artist’s research but also of Colonial coincidences, of the meetings that took place during the months prior to the opening, which oœ en oriented the research in an unexpected though pro- Hauntology ductive manner. During the research process, the history of the museum’s heritage came across the artist’s personal history, which, like many other by Giulia Grechi Italian family stories, extends outside the borders of one nation. us, for

[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 gen- ocide and looting. However, these museums oœ 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 ur- gencies of our contemporaries, inside and out museums, are linked to this past that still torments the present, in its ghostly posthumous life. e muse- um 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 “diffi cult memory” for Europe. It is about going beyond active forgetfulness, the “selective oblivion” (Ricoeur, 2004), the construction of exotic and pa- example, during a preliminary survey in the museum archives, the artist tronizing imaginaries (like “Italians, good people”), which have dominated stumbled upon a model of Sabratha, an archaeological site in Libya in which the strategies and policies of memorization with respect to our colonial past, his grandfather, an archaeologist, had worked. Many intimate memories and and reshape our ethical and political expectations towards narratives closer stories of Italian colonialism oœ en overlap in unpredictable ways with pub- to the diasporic quality of contemporary cultures. First of all, it is about reo- lic memories, with History. Complex aff ections that, faced with the historical pening archives and critically interrogating them. judgment of colonialism, do not cease to express themselves because the tie Inside the Pigorini Museum, Leone Contini has created a complex, transme- is intimate; it is the place where personal or family identity intertwine with dia installation suspended between the intimacy of family stories and the that “Italianness” which is so diffi cult to defi ne. e colonial question is not institutional narrative embedded in the objects of the museum collections, just about historiography; it aff ects people’s daily lives, their beloved ones, which were re-told in a critical and sometimes ironic manner. e video A their consumption, their identifi cation processes, their intimate and cultural Tripoli (To Tripoli) takes its title from a famous fascist propaganda song, Bel memories. It is by penetrating the territories of domesticity and the broad ar- suol d’amore, also called A Tripoli, and shows a series of situations, meetings ticulation of contradictory aff ections (from guilt to shame and nostalgia) that and moments collected during the preparatory research period of the instal- we can transform the postcolonial debate into something tangible because lation. Rather than just documenting the process, the video highlights how that is the place where popular memories and archival practices meet, where

Refl ections, 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. 10 — 11

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 fl oor, half packed, desecrated, as an attempt to break through the colonial amnesia, without celebrating its actors.

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 cul- tural identity” (Grechi, Gravano 2016, 42). erefore, the palm tree becomes in the eyes of the artist “a sort of polyvalent key, to access contradictory do- mains”: 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 reconnec- tion 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 evoca- tions, which he calls Anemic Palms, “paper palms of an ephemeral empire”, while the small original metal palm is shown together with others objects and people elaborate the narratives that give meaning to their life and history. It private documents of his family, in the display case Inner Libya. is repre- is in front of that model of Sabratha, covered with a cloth in the archives of sents a sort of small, where “stories” full of traces of “History”, removed from the museum, that ignited the “serendipity” which shiœ ed and addressed the the museum display, are exposed. Nevertheless, this history is still present artist’s research work at the Pigorini Museum, following the traces of Italian in its archives, like also in the attics and the drawers of many Italian, Libyan, colonialism as in an investigation process. e model is part of the heritage and Italian-Libyan families and constitutes a whole historical and cultural of the former African Colonial Museum in Rome. Closed for many years, over heritage mostly ignored by institutions that could help us to understand that time its collection was scattered in several other places such as the Gallery of our identity is essentially transnational and “migrant”; the result of contami- Modern Art, the Museum of Infantry and the National Library, thus becom- nations and translations that have contributed to shaping it and given it both ing a sort of uncomfortable legacy, a dispersed body, “a sort of ‘undigested’ words and imaginary. Moreover, these “stories” could help us to understand remains hidden in basements or locked in the archives.” How to bring this the “intimate” nature of colonial relations, “the logic of ‘coexistence’, the dy- dismembered and orphaned body, hidden and inaccessible, back to light, out namics of intimacy and familiarity” (Mbembe 2005, 133), which existed dur- of the archives and into public discourse? ing the colonial period despite the crime and violence typical of every occu- In the video A Tripoli, a close-up shows the hands of Leone and Tina Gaudino, pation. ey have survived in the postcolonial period, making the narration a museum employee, born in Tripoli, who repair a small metal palm, presum- even more complex and slippery, but also more interesting due to what they 12 — 13

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. Restolen, Leone Contini, 2017 (video stills). 14 — 15 The egg in the cuscus, Rome 2018. Still from the video A Tripoli (Leone Contini, 2017, available at: https://vimeo.com/226141793). can tell about us, our identity, based on their roots which have been constant- ly contaminated by diff erence 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 justifi ed 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 diffi cult memories associated with them. ey are leœ , 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 As a consequence, the artist has chosen to exhibit a video of the entire 3D give substance to these spectral presences and to the story they encapsulate mask-making process. e 3D reproduction is displayed next to the original is to duplicate them, bringing to light their double in a uncanny way, like a mask to avoid simply replicating the historical appropriation according to a formal interrogation, which requires us to explain the scientifi c arguments new, technologically-advanced version. Restolen #2 becomes a sort of trap for provided by the anthropological knowledge to racism and the violent ob- the spectator. e “new” mask is exposed on the wall with a sensor that is jectifi cation and dehumanization of the colonized. Today, the ethnographic able to detect the presence of someone near and starts shooting pictures, ac- museum is one of the main instruments called by ethical responsibility to companied by a loud noise, thus “stealing” the visitor’s image without his/her respond to this request. e artist has chosen one of the masks of the muse- permission. e artist reproduces, therefore, for a second time, the dynamics um, scanned and reproduced it with a 3D printer, during a process that lasted of appropriation—from which the title “re-stolen”—this time reversing the several weeks with the collaboration of a Neapolitan printer, who also has role of the subjects involved. We are the ones who, when “looking closely”, Libyan-Italian origins (“serendipity, again!”). e installation is called Resto- like well-disciplined anthropologists and museologists, become the object of len (Stolen Back) because it is about “stealing back from the museum some- the appropriative gaze of the same devices of identity construction we have thing that was once stolen to a person; its features.” On the one hand, it is a used for centuries to objectify and belittle the Other. 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, Agamben, G. 2009. “Dell’utilità e degli inconvenienti del vivere fra spettri” in Nudità, Rome: Nottetempo. the artist describes how, in the process of reproducing the mask, something Del Boca, A. 2005. Italiani brava gente?, Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore. else emerged, as if the process had recalled and evoked the presence of the Gregos, K., Meessen, V. 2016. Personne et les autres, exhibition catalogue of the Belgian Pavillion person behind the mask, giving it its body back, contesting and subverting at the 56th Venice Biennale. Grechi, G., Gravano, V. eds. 2016. Presente imperfetto. Eredità coloniali e immaginari razziali contemporanei, the necrophilic power of the object that had transformed it into a musealized Milan: Mimesis. object. “ e face, fl oating in the digital void of the laptop screen, appeared to Mbembe, A. 2005. Postcolonialismo, Rome: Meltemi. Original edition 2000. On the Post-Colony, Berkeley: University of California Press. be alive again, in contrast with the deadly aura of the original plaster object.” Ricoeur, P. 2004. Ricordare, dimenticare, perdonare, Bologna: Il Mulino. °±²³´µ is an independent quarterly peer-reviewed, non- profi t journal that brings together original contributions to explore emerging issues in the fi eld of heritage and museum studies. Selected research papers published in a sixteen-page, custom-designed, off -set print, limited edition. Each is- sue investigates a specifi c topic from diff erent perspec- tives focusing on practices, innovative approaches and design by experimental research actions. ree issues per year: ‘Snapshots’, with graphic-based contributions raising questions and investigating prac- tices; ‘Dialogues’, in which the topic unfolds through a semi-structured interview; and ‘Insights’, that expands the fi eld of inquiry by means of theoretical and empir- ical critical thoughts.

Scientifi c 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 Sta 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 [email protected]

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 refl ect the views of the European Union.