Walk in Naples among the ruins of lost colonial dreams

The European city is a colonial archive, whether it is London and Paris or Naples and Milan. That is, it is already an open archive and does not need a specific museum or institution to distinguish this situation. Rather than building a museum and commemorating the past, killing it in a list of dead forms, surely it is more important to have the means to read, receive and critically transform this heritage. This would make the story a work of expository and antithetical; Something very important to leave to historians. We also learned positively Sego and Renault Bianchi in Rome denied. Postcolonial itineraries in the city (2014), reading the names of its streets and squares already means encountering memories carved in stone, concrete and glass. It is the recording of the colonial constitution of every western city.

It is considered Circulating colonial capital, extracted from territorial aggression and the labor of slaves and subordinates of the land, meant going deeper into modern buildings. In 2015, the British government finally repaid the nearly £17 billion in debt it paid its owners to free slaves in the British Empire in 1834. That capital went to finance factories, the technical innovations that produced Industrial Revolution cities, populated by classes Emerging labor, brutal extraction of human, animal and wild resources on a planetary scale are the underpinnings of today’s ecological instability.

and also in Naples the deceptively green expanse of today’s Mostra d’Oltremare, not to mention the direct but ignored links with the depredations of Mexico and the destruction of the Mesoamerican realm embodied in the nomenclature and opulence of the Villa Pignatelli-Cortes on the Riviera di Chia, well displayed in the 2020 work of the artist María Teresa Alves : Thieves and Killers in Naples: A Brief History of Families, Colonialism, Immense Wealth, Land Theft, Art, and the Valle de Zico Community Museum in Mexico (Thieves and Killers in Naples: A Brief History of Families, Colonialism, Immense Wealth, Land Theft, and Art, Mexico’s Valle de Xico Community Museum).

Tomorrow there will be an event, part of the ongoing artistic research project, «Il Paese delle Terre d’Oltremare. Architecture made of cement and papier-mâché: restoring the irreparable »curated by artist Alessandra Ciannelli and architect Filomena Carangelo, in the giant exhibition center of the Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples. It is a walking tour interspersed with a picnic, moving between buildings and selected sites, and a series of observations will be proposed which will then be shared at the end of the day in exchanges and discussions.

opened Founded on May 9, 1940 and closed a month later when Italy entered the war, the site was peppered with fascist rhetoric, heralding Italy’s entry into modernity as a colonial and imperial power. Continuity from the Roman Empire, through the defense of Christianity from Islam and the Ottoman Empire, through to modern technologies that ensured world domination by the West is celebrated, and then settled into the physical presence of the natives and flora from the newly conquered colonies of Libyans and Ethiopians. It is all too easy to forget that just over seventy years ago all the regions bordering the African and Asian shores of the Mediterranean were under the direct control of Paris, London and… Rome.

It is a matter of questioning, even turning the Mostra d’Oltremare upside down and emptying its contents and languages. Re-reading and re-framing this material as a contemporary project means interrupting the institutional chronology to propose another collection, perhaps illuminated by an unauthorized future, to touch upon another poetics and politics. In other words, calling for the creation of another space-time rather than the usual archives of domain. This means asking fundamental questions about the place and role of archives in our lives. If the city is an archive: how is it defined and shaped, by whom, where and how; Who has the right to be registered and recognized? To open this container and reconfigure its parts in a more open and democratic way, it suffices to consider the question posed by the Italian East Africans brought to Naples in 1940 and the return of this history through the contemporary immigrant. Africa is slipping under Europe along the colonial cracks. Linear time is truncated and has only local relevance; becomes quantum.

The violence of silence pervades all of this. The challenge of refusing to listen, respond and take responsibility for this space and history still breathes remains in the constitution of the present. Between the material and the immaterial, between the huge and the memory, other narratives emerge that allow us to intervene without permission in the recovery of the colonial city as a palimpsest for another future. Our deliberate rejection of inherited coordinates and their associated significations allows us to challenge the designed dissolution of social spaces, their current management, and the capitalist colonization of public heritage.

In this strategy, the practice of the arts in their diffusion of redundant meaning provides an experimental yet incisive platform as a critical language. The discontinuity spread by the arts creates black holes in space-time, releasing energies that allow the recovery of deprived places, abandoned memories and rejected stories.
The physical and metaphysical remains allow the Mostra d’Oltremare, once recreated in this way, to draw another map of the present world. It extends beyond the borders of Italian fascism to traverse the West and ultimately record the colonial formation of modernity itself … From this walk among the ruins of shattered colonial dreams in the prairies of West Naples and the Planet.