The Africa-Italy Connection

The idea behind this intervention on Italy as a platform for critical analysis of African visual art and its multiple trajectories came out of a series of events that took place in the art world in 2015: the appointment of Okwui Enwezor as the artistic director and curator of the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World's Futures, and Simon Njami's exhibition The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by African Artists held at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt Am Main. These two exhibitions not only represent the visibility and influence of African visual artists, curators, and critics in the contemporary global art world (an art world that still very much orbits around Europe and the United States) but also reflect a moment in the history of Italy that is changing and being shaped, negotiated, and reimagined by the African diaspora and by migration movements across the Mediterranean. This movement is in turn forcing Italy to question its history and reevaluate longstanding certainties about human rights, national identity, borders, and boundaries. Importantly, Italy is being deconstructed, interrogated, and reimagined through multiple, transnational perspectives, challenging the country's narratives and historical position of power and authority as an important locus of Western art and civilization. This process brings into further focus Italy's colonial history, which has until recently suffered from a collective cultural amnesia at home and has been overshadowed, diminished, or ignored by other European empires and their postcolonial trajectories.

It is within this context that Okwui Enwezor chose to commemorate one of the most respected and longstanding exhibiting institutions La Biennale di Venezia with a pluralism in the visual arts to express the tensions, uncertainties, and anxieties of the contemporary world, in playful contrast with the origins of the exhibition as a 19th-century model dedicated to national representation, nation-building, and fixed national identities. Okwui Enwezor (2015) wrote, “These histories and their collisions go beyond the bounds of the exhibition site itself, and extend into the bloodstream of global geopolitics, cultural memory, and the spaces of art” (p. 93).

Similarly, The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by African Artists plays with the work of Dante Alighieri, who is credited as the founding father of Italian culture and the Italian language itself, by reinterpreting this canonical work through African visual artists in order to question how we think about Africa and how we continue to construct universalisms through Western epistemological frames. The appropriation of Dante's work takes the form of inverting the three poems from the original Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, thereby breaking with the past and giving the work new meaning, while providing the artists with a new perspective from which to comment on the human condition and explore both personal and universal myths that form part of the geopolitical landscape of modernity.

As the year 2015 came to a close, the British Museum in London announced that the last acquisition of its retiring director Neil MacGregor was the Lampedusa Cross. The artwork, made with wood from the wreckage of a fatal accident involving a boat that sank off the coast of Lampedusa in 2013, was made by a local carpenter in response to the stories of the survivors. It represents a very personal testament to the plight of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean, risking their lives in the process. But the power of the object is given currency by the British Museum as an institution that has claimed authority on turning a humble material object into one that reflects a moment in “our” shared history.

The interventions presented by scholars, archivists, visual artists, and filmmakers in this issue of Critical Interventions are in different ways and in different media, engaged in reassessing Italy's past, interpreting the relevance of history in the present, and reimagining the future as essentially interconnected and entangled. It begins with an article on Italy's contradictory relationship to colonialism in the postcolonial years between the 1950s and 1970s when the image and idea of Africa played a significant part in reinventing Italian modernity in the postwar and post-Fascist years of national rebuilding. Taking the Second Congress of African Writers and Artists organized by Présence Africaine in Rome in 1959 as a starting point, the article explores its significance in terms of a wider cultural decolonization process and how visual artists responded to a changing geopolitical landscape. It analyzes the cultural and political networks that were established between Italy and newly emerging or reemerging African independent nations and looks at the artworks that resulted from these exchanges.

Giulia Barrera's article evaluates the history and uncertain fate of the archive collection held at the Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO) (Italian Institute for Africa and Orient) in Rome, a collection inextricably linked to Italy's imperial and colonial history in Africa and the Far East. The institute is currently in liquidation, and the future of the archive, a collection of valuable photographs, documents, paintings, and art objects, is uncertain, as plans to disperse the archive to different locations and entities risks fueling an even greater void about its colonial past in Italy's collective memory. Barrera not only exposes to a wider audience the campaign for safeguarding this unique archive led by ASAI, the Association dedicated to African Studies in Italy, but also points to how Italy's bureaucratic and highly politicized landscape and general cultural apathy share collective responsibility for its demise.

While one archive's future is uncertain, another is emerging. Alessandro Triulzi's article introduces us to creative interventions taking place in Italy, independently from the state, that are responding to a growing need to document and to represent social and cultural transformations within the country over the past couple of decades. Triulzi introduces us to the Archivio Memorie Migranti AMM (Archives of Migrant Memories) a platform for artists, film directors and writers to share their stories and to contribute toward creating a new archive for the future that represents a plurality of voices, histories, and identities cohabiting the Italian landscape—a landscape still dominated by discrimination, inequality, and exclusion. Triulzi eloquently explores the powerful agency filmmaking and artmaking have in countering dominant narratives and negotiating the experiences of migrants.

Elena Korzhenevich presents a conversation between filmmakers Gabriele Del Grande and Dagmawi Yimer, both concerned in changing prevailing narratives about migrants through their personal stories that bear witness to the experiences of migrants crossing the liquid barrier that is the Mediterranean Sea and the social barriers they are met with in Italian society. This interview between two important filmmakers represents the work of lettera27, one of the catalyst nonprofit umbrella organizations working creatively in Italy today with a particular focus on disseminating alternative information, images, and representations of Africa through new media platforms linked to a wider web of international networks and projects.

Iain Chambers and Celeste Ianniciello's intervention on Migration and the Mediterranean Matrix contributes to this edition an important theoretical frame of reference centered on the postcolonial Mediterranean into which migration and contemporary art practices intersect and provide us with new forms of cultural belonging and citizenship that are heterogeneous and transnational. Taking migration and mobility across the Mediterranean and the world as a continuous historical process, the authors explore and articulate the role visual art has in rethinking and renegotiating our national borders and racial, socioeconomic, and cultural boundaries, illustrated by three projects based in southern Italy and the Mediterranean: an innovative museum concept and living archive dedicated to migration on the island of Lampedusa, a multivocal visual web-based archive led by women artists looking at issues from the transient and fluid viewpoint of the Mediterranean Sea, and, finally, a postcolonial research based project that demystifies Italy's colonial overseas territories through analyzing the production of exotic myths, images, and ideas about the colonies that emerge from international exhibiting events.

Included in this issue, we have Allison Moore's article reviewing The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, and Mallory Sharp Baskett's analysis of the 56th Venice Biennale. Moore navigates the complex narratives and worlds that both separate and bring together Dante Alighieri's literary work with the artwork of African artists featured in the exhibition under Simon Njami's curatorial oversight. Baskett provides a historical analysis of La Biennale from its colonialist origins to the struggles for visibility of African nations (through its pavilions), African artists and curators represented at the Biennale, and what it tells us about the globalized art world(s) of today.

This issue of Critical Interventions concludes with two portfolios by visual artists Gea Casolaro and rosenclaire. Interestingly, these artists share in common a collaborative approach to artmaking. Gea Casolaro is an Italian artist working in video and photography. The work presented here, titled Sharing Gazes, came out of her residency at the Italian Cultural Institute in Addis Ababa, where she collaborated with students from Addis Ababa University's Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. Casolaro uses what she calls a “viewpoint exchange” achieved through a collective process in which artists photograph each other and different sites within the city's landscape and piece these images together in order to provide a visual narrative from a plurality of angles. rosenclaire (sic) are two artists originally from South Africa based in Italy working individually and collaboratively in different media. Their work presented in this edition is particularly engaged in looking at Italy's conflictual and contradictory relationship to colonial history, which continues to produce and reproduce racial stereotypes of Africa in popular culture and media, critiquing in the process the distorted myths about Italian colonial, national history and identity.

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Helena Cantone

Helena Cantone ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London researching the work of Salvatore Fiume (1915–1997) and the artistic exchanges between Italy and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. She graduated in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS in 1998 and went on to obtain an MA in Education at Goldsmiths University and to cofound an arts education charity in London working with young people. Helena is editor of H-AfrArts, a humanities and social sciences online network dedicated to the expressive arts of Africa and the Diaspora.