How must we relate to the works and documents in the collections of the former Colonial Museum in Rome, the evidence of Italy’s nearly century-long colonial history in Africa (1882-1960)? How should we repurpose materials originally musealized as propaganda in support of the sy- stematic occupation of colonized territories and the con- struction of colonial fictions?
Answering these questions is the objective of the ongoing research that the Museum of Civilizations shares with mul- tiple stakeholders: researchers, artists, curators, activists, citizens, witnesses, collectives and communities at both local and international level in the attempt to explore po- tential processes for the de-colonization of Italy’s colo- nial heritage. This initially requires addressing the many responsibilities of a Museum that preserves some 12,000 objects consisting of archaeological artifacts, works of art, craft artifacts, goods, seeds, scientific and technolo- gical instruments, and maps and exhibition devices that have spent more than 50 years in storage (since 1971, the year of closure of the Colonial Museum) and allowed to the phenomenon of erasing Italy’s colonial past from the nation’s consciousness, the subsequent shirking of re- sponsibility for it, and the social phenomena our contem- porary times have inherited from it. The current layout – partial and temporary, titled Museum of Opacities – cen- ters on the collections of the former Colonial Museum of Rome that became part of the Museum of Civilizations in 2017 and are currently undergoing re-contextualization. The sense of “opacity” here is twofold: on one hand, opa- city makes literal reference to the dark veil of amnesia that was pulled over the colonial era of Italy’s history and masked its events, figures, and the names of its protago- nists. On the other, opacity is an unalienable right claimed for any individual by the poet and essayist Édouard Glis- sant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1928 – Paris, France, 2011), whose texts were of fundamental importance in the deve- lopment of post-colonial and de-colonial thought. In 1959, Glissant took part in the 2 nd Global Congress of Black Wri- ters and Artists1 organized at the Italian Institute for Afri- ca in Rome, the entity to which the collections of the for- mer Colonial Museum of Rome had been assigned in 1956 following the abolition of the Ministry for Italian Africa. As conceived by Glissant, opacity is the right of each and every one of us to keep her or his identity separate from any ideas others may have formed, hence free from the transparency of unilateral classification and the acceptan- ce that reduces our identity to the categories adopted by others. Glissant observes that the act of “comprehending” implies the “movement of hands grasping anything in re- ach and bringing it closer”—thus, a “gesture of enclosing, if not seizing”—to which he contrasts “sharing”, which in- stead leads to affirming the impossibility of reducing the other to any definition that she or he has not autonomou- sly generated themselves.
It is precisely with this scenario of regenerative sharing and potential that these collections confront us, welco- ming the complexity and criticality of their possible and necessary re-contextualization. By way of example, this process can be initiated by creating dialogue between the collections of the former Colonial Museum and selected documents and works of contemporary art that originated from research into stories that were never given a place in previous museum layouts and narratives. Our hypothetical Museum of Opacities arises here, in the attempt to give form to these omissions, also by using photos of the origi- nal exhibits as “anthropological testimonial”2 and critical memory of the original political and social contextualiza- tion. First and most of all, the gesture illustrates the rela- tionships between the objects exhibited and the linguistic and exhibition devices that supported the interpretation given to them. Positioned against the backdrop of these ghosts—which resurface both as appearances from the past and traces of the past’s persistence in the present— the historical and contemporary works on display present new ways of exploring, documenting, and sharing colonial history. In such setting, contemporary additions—that also include new productions derived from museum artistic residency processes—offer the possibility of freely rene- gotiating the previous terms of history, propelling it from the past into the future, returning the word to the many subjectivities once excluded from the museum narrative.
1 The event was attended by 150 delegates, including key figures such as Frantz Fa- non, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, some months before 1960, the symbo- lic year of African nations’ first independence. The congress was held, however, amid generalized indifference from institutions and public opinion which were caught up in the economic boom and perhaps eager to forget colonial relations with Africa.
2 Concept expressed by Germano Celant in the essay “Verso una storia reale e conte- stuale” published in the catalogue of the Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics Italia 1918–1943 exhibition at Fondazione Prada, Milano, from February 18 to June 25, 2018.