Bel suol d'amore - The Scattered Colonial Body
Progetto prodotto da TRACES - Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts From Intervention to Co-Production

This research-based project, developed within the European project "TRACES - Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production" focused on the collections of the former African Museum of Rome (created during fascism as a propaganda tool, to promote colonization), closed to the public since decades. It gradually turned out that this heterogeneous collection, belonged (at that time) to a non-existing museum, and it was scattered around the Capital, hosted in different locations: the ethnographic museum, the Modern Art Galley, the Infantry Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the National Library. It gradually appeared to me as a body, dismembered and dispersed, to hide the evidence of something we don’t want to remember, of an historical crime.

These objects are sort of “undigested” remains of Italian history, hidden in basements or locked in the archives, and because of their institutional orphanage they are not accessible to the public and the collective awareness.

The project, culminated in an exhibition and several lecture-performances at Pigorini Museum, is a survey into a collective amnesia, an archaeology of the oblivion.

The research had various outputs: several public presentations, an exhibition co-created with the anthropologist Arnd Schneider and (later) a film.  

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Il progetto si articola nel contesto del progetto europeo "TRACES - Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production", e si sviluppa attorno alle collezioni dell'ex museo coloniale di Roma, creato durante il fascismo come strumento di propaganda e chiuso al pubblico da decenni: durante la ricerca emerge progressivamente il fatto che queste collezioni sono in realtà disperse in giro per la città, ospiti temporanee nei magazzini di varie istituzioni romane: Museo Pigorini, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Museo Zoologico, Museo della Fanteria, Libreria Nazionale. La ricerca in questi luoghi inaccessibili al pubblico si è configura come investigazione di un’amnesia collettiva.

La ricerca ha avuto vari esisti: molte presentazioni pubbliche, una mostra co-creata con l'antropologo Arnd Schneider e successivamente un film.