Università Roma Tre

Africa - Fascism - Modernism
This course examines the relationship between East Africa and Italian Modernism in the 1930s. The lectures will investigate the government's promotion of an Italian colonial art, visual strategies related to the representation of the Ethiopian War by Second Futurism, and the use of ethnographic and archaeological objects by Fascist colonial propaganda. The first international exhibitions of colonial art, held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1931 and in Naples at the Maschio Angioino in 1934, as well as the Mostra Triennale delle Terre d’Oltremare in 1940, constitute ideal laboratories for investigating the transmedia strategies of fascist propaganda. The international exhibitions and the monumental policy of celebrating the colonial enterprise in Africa are flanked by the reorganization of the Colonial Museum in Rome, invested with a propulsive role in Italian artistic culture through a dense program of temporary exhibitions ranging from retrospectives of "Africanist" artists of the late 19th century to the most up-to-date experiments of Second Futurism. The cultural biography of cases of Ethiopian monumental heritage stolen in the 1930s, relocated and resemantized in the urban space of the Capital and finally returned will also be reconstructed.
The second part of the course will be devoted to workshop activities focusing on the analysis of textual sources and materials related to the study of the 1930s (artists’ letters and diaries, institutional documents, military memoirs, press articles, manifesti and literary texts and exhibition catalogs).

Bibliographic references will be provided at the beginning of the course.

Africa - Fascism - Modernism
This course examines the relationship between East Africa and Italian Modernism in the 1930s. The lectures will investigate the government's promotion of an Italian colonial art, visual strategies related to the representation of the Ethiopian War by Second Futurism, and the use of ethnographic and archaeological objects by Fascist colonial propaganda. The first international exhibitions of colonial art, held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1931 and in Naples at the Maschio Angioino in 1934, as well as the Mostra Triennale delle Terre d’Oltremare in 1940, constitute ideal laboratories for investigating the transmedia strategies of fascist propaganda. The international exhibitions and the monumental policy of celebrating the colonial enterprise in Africa are flanked by the reorganization of the Colonial Museum in Rome, invested with a propulsive role in Italian artistic culture through a dense program of temporary exhibitions ranging from retrospectives of "Africanist" artists of the late 19th century to the most up-to-date experiments of Second Futurism. The cultural biography of cases of Ethiopian monumental heritage stolen in the 1930s, relocated and resemantized in the urban space of the Capital and finally returned will also be reconstructed.
The second part of the course will be devoted to workshop activities focusing on the analysis of textual sources and materials related to the study of the 1930s (artists’ letters and diaries, institutional documents, military memoirs, press articles, manifesti and literary texts and exhibition catalogs).

Bibliographic references will be provided at the beginning of the course.