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, focused on the former African Museum of Rome (established during fascism as a propaganda tool, to promote colonization), closed to the public since decades. It gradually turned out that this heterogeneous collection, belonging to a non-existing museum, 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.