Edited by Kathryn Weir
Artem, Napoli, 2024
A spotlight on Naples in the years around 1940, to examine — through the perspectives of artists and critical thinkers — the history and contemporary legacy of the interconnection between colonialism and fascism. By highlighting a geographical and temporal convergence between histories rarely told together, the project presented artistic research, works, and installations that uncovered links between the physical and psychological violence of colonialism and that of fascism, exploring the philosophical, aesthetic, and iconographic apparatus underpinning both. […] Artistic investigations into landscapes and places bear witness to the imposition of an economic hegemony over the South by the North, reinforced both by the control of scientific knowledge and by parallel apparatuses of aesthetic idealization and exoticism. The project reflects in particular on the Mostra d’Oltremare, inaugurated in Naples on 9 May 1940. The artists involved reflect on the content, aesthetics, and significance of the narrative, visual, and historical traces of this period — from archival materials to architectural heritage. They appropriate elements of a “difficult heritage,” among them 1930s maps produced by the Consociazione Turistica Italiana for Italian East Africa; photographs taken by Hilmar Landwehr, a Wehrmacht soldier in Campania between 1942 and 1943; and images from the magazines La Difesa della Razza and Tempo, subsidized by the fascist regime. [Kathryn Weir]