Heritage politics in the case of Black Lives Matter in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy

ABSTRACT

This contribution looks at the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that took place in Bolzano-Bozen, the capital of the autonomous province of South Tyrol (Italy). As part of the BLM protests, an iconic statue of Italian cultural heritage was doused with red paint, transmitting a message with local, national, and international resonance. The case demonstrates how the USA BLM diffusion in Europe interacted with the ongoing statue wars to not only advance national level dialogues around racist legacies related to imperialism and colonialism but also specific local grievances. I marshal the concept of ‘ideological vandalism’ to argue that red paint attacks on public monuments can link transnational messages around racism and colonialism with local and national debates particularly regarding participation in heritage politics. This case underscores how claims can arise when national and international sociopolitical debates connected to colonialism and imperialism activate and surface additional local grievances around participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural heritage
• vandalism
• resistance
• protest
• symbolic politics
• and monuments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Short of toppling a monument, there are a variety of options such as placing offensive statues in statue parks or turning statues upside down (Candelaria, 2020, p. 3). Other suggestions include moving statues to museums where they might be displayed as propaganda (Gregory, 2021, p. 4). Another approach has been to recontextualize a monument with artistic interventions; for example, in New Zealand, the site of an offensive statue of Captain Cook was redeveloped to include artworks from locals to shift attention to marginalized stories (Ballantyne, 2021, pp. 5–6). The addition of a corrective plaque or new inscription on a statue is seen to offer the possibility to ‘“amend and expand” the meaning of a monument’ (Gregory, 2021, p. 5). There are some observers who are even in favor of embracing graffiti and paint as a way of acknowledging changing meanings, values, and interpretations (Gregory, 2021, p. 5). Still, recent research sheds doubt on the possibilities for completely disarming a monument of its controversy through modifications (Thompson, 2020).

2 A book written in 1906 by E.D. Morel to condemn the violence surrounding the extractive practices of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo was called Red Rubber. The use of the color red was meant to invoke the bleeding metaphorically of a country as well as the horrific abuses inflicted on the Congolese to support the rubber trade. See Budabin and Richey (2021).

3 The messages of the BLM movement overlapped and strengthened contention connected to European statues representing colonial and post-colonial legacies; for example, King Leopold II in Belgium, slave trader Robert Milligan in London (UK), Cecil Rhodes in Oxford (UK) and The Kitchener Memorial in Scotland (see table in Allam et al., 2021, p. 6).

4 These include Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, the Dodecanese Islands, and Albania.

5 In other parts of the region, there have even been violent actions (such as bombs) that have attempted to destroy certain monuments (Tra ricordi e contesto, 2020).

6 A second intervention concerned the contentious bas-relief on the face of the former fascist party headquarters Casa Littoria that featured Mussolini that depicted fascist military victories. An installation was also made atop the offending relief of the former Casa Littoria, now the city’s Finance Department. See Carlà and Mitterhofer (2017) and Di Michele (2020).

7 The dedication is written in Italian and reads ‘AGLI ATESINI CADUTI PER IMPERO ROMA RICONOSCENTE’.

8 Casa Italiana NYU. (2020, May 20). Black Lives Matter in Italy: Movements & mobilizations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtlpVe71ZW0

9 Montanelli had purchased a 12-year old Eritrean girl as his wife during his service in the 2nd Italy-Ethiopian War in 1936. The anti-fascist group I sentinelli also wrote a public letter requesting the removal of the statue.