Jacopo Rinaldi’s environmental installation further develops and investigates reflection on colonialism and twentieth-century Italian history introduced in the previous chapters. The key element of the project is a sheet of metal in which a pattern is engraved which the artist builds through repetition of a graphic element, a design Rinaldi produced from an image Luigi Daniele Crespi made for Pirelli in the twenties. The hands hold each other while at the same time holding a rubber eraser, made of course by Pirelli. Unlike the original design, the artist has the hands wear white gloves like Mickey Mouse’s (first worn by the cartoon character in 1929, in an episode in which his character acts as a “snake charmer”, definitely “non-western”). This graphic element is therefore not so much a historic document as a visual note, the result of historic speculation and a thinly veiled act of accusation combining colonialism, exploitation of primary resources (such as rubber in Africa) and representation of otherness, in a constant process of expansion and negation, like the pattern spreading over the ceiling of Casa Testori, seeking to erase itself with the hands holding erasers.
Starting on the veranda of Casa Testori, and continuing into the fireplace room, Alessandra Ferrini’s long-term research project entitled A Bomb tobe Reloaded is set up in a number of different nuclei. As is often the case of projects that grow and are developed over years, the work is divided into a number of chapters exploring stories and vicissitudes linked with Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon (CDFF), founded by Giovanni Pirelli in 1963 and dedicated to the famous psychiatrist and philosopher born in Martinique, a naturalised French citizen, whose work was essential for the development of the decolonialisation movements in Asia, Latin America and North Africa. As the artist writes, “The project is divided into a number of chapters exploring different characters and elements investigated during my study of Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon. The work is based on the structure of a constellation of voices, characters and places that are in one way or another linked with study of the CDFF”. The work as a whole addresses the potential for revitalisation of a resistantarchive, that is, an archive which, despite having been moved and dismembered, continues to have the ability to address and interrogate the present, like a bomb about to go off. The political implications of the entire project are therefore not only in terms of content, but also methodology, because they cast light on possibilities and tools for giving voice to events and stories that are only apparently silent.
And so A Bomb to be Reloaded winds through the rooms of the exhibition:
CHAPTER 0 – Fireplace hall
This chapter acts as an introduction to the project and to the process of researching the CDFF, and in particular the materials in its library and periodicals collection, revealing the international network developed from the Centro, especially with the anti-colonial and anti imperialist movements in Africa, Central and South America and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the spaces containing the materials and the history of their dispersal, the research was conducted in a 2018 workshop with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. It includes documents that belonged to CDFF and documentary material on historic sites of activism in Milan, such as Archivio Primo Moroni, the squatted bakery Panetteria Occupata, and Istituto Nazionale della Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy.
CHAPTER 1 – Fireplace hall
The first chapter, in chronological order, explores Fanon’s direct influence on Giovanni Pirelli and on the director Valentino Orsini. The installation includes historic documents, publications and quotes printed on large banners, and focuses on the film directed by Orsini, I Dannati della Terra (1969), with an interview Ferrini conducted with Kadigia Bove, an actress who appears in the historic film named after Fanon’s famous book. This presence also attempts to make up for women’s lack of visibility in narration of the historic context of what is referred to as “Third-Worldism”. The installation specifically reveals the importance of self-analysis and self-criticism in the authors’ writing and in the exhibition.
CHAPTER 2 – Veranda
This chapter focuses on composer Luigi Nono’s A floresta è jovem echeja de vida, written in 1965 and 1966 in collaboration with Giovanni Pirelli and first performed in 1966 at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice during the 19th Experimental Music Biennale. Through historic documents and videos, Ferrini’s installation reconstructs the historic performance but “does so partially, focusing on a number of documents that underline the influence of Fanon’s thought on the work and on one of its performers, Kadigia Bove, who links this chapter with the previous one”. Kadigia’s stories enrich the narration with a series of anecdotes and autobiographical stories, opening a window onto the experience of the actress and singer of Italian-Somali origins in post-war Italy.
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Jacopo Rinaldi transforms the great hall in Casa Testori into a green house full of little tropical plants. The installation may be interpreted in a number of ways which go beyond what at first sight appears to be simple botanical interest. The first level of interpretation has to do with the title of the work, Maradagàl: the name of the imaginary town in which Carlo Emilio Gadda sets his novel La cognizione del dolore (Theexperience of pain), 1963. Maradagàl is an imaginary place, but it is also a fictitious reconstruction of Brianza under fascist rule in the nineteen-twenties, and a sharp criticism of Italy’s indolent bourgeois society of the time. In these terms, the plants Rinaldi has selected are an ironic comment and criticism of the bourgeois dimension of the Milanese culture in which Testori himself was born. And the inclusion of a tropical plant in the home, as Penny Sparke points out, is itself a colonial decorative act, originating in Victorian England, legitimising the exotic, aspirational dimension of bourgeois–modernist culture.
But there is, in the simplicity of this action, another level on which the work may be read: the tropical plants allude much more specifically to Italian history and relate to Gadda’s story, the fascist years and the country’s colonial past, in an intimate way, because the plants in the exhibition are of the species Ricinus Communis, commonly known as the castor oil plant.
The exhibition opens with an installation created by Alessandra Ferrini specifically for Casa Testori, an eco system of clues and references regarding the visual culture and critical activity of Giovanni Testori. This is a seminal work in relation to the exhibition as a whole, in that it documents the theoretical approach characterising the entire process, based on construction of a series of visual assonances, historic references and new cultural and historical relations. In this specific case, we find a number of articles written by Testori in “Corriere della Sera” about African art and a series of digital compositions in which a number of details of modern paintings appear. Alessandra Ferrini’s reflection is inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s essay Morelli, Freud andSherlock Holmes: Clues and ScientificMethod1, in which the famous historian compares famous art historian Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, revealing the incomplete arbitrariness of a method of investigation based on the detail and the fragment, whether it be in a painting or in a criminal case. This arbitrariness also characterises the “realist” hegemony of western art history over the cultures we have colonised, which, as Testori points out in his articles, cannot be reduced to European epistemological systems. From this point of view, Ferrini’s work itself becomes a network of clues, in which fragments of paintings, a photograph cut in half of Roberto Longhi holding a magnifying lens and material from Testori’s archive (including letters asking the critic about attribution of a painting to Daniele Crespi) suggest a different point of view from which viewers can read about and approach art history, its limitations and the hegemonic mechanisms it has triggered and continues to trigger.
China, South Africa, Guatemala and Italy, the small room closing the itinerary documents, with images and a brief video created from an online channel of Al Jazeera, the story of the ArtsLords. This group, directed by Kabir Mokamel, has invaded the city of Kabul, In Afghanistan, with graffiti placed on the city walls, erected as a defence against frequent suicide attacks. And not only there. Kilometres of abandoned walls, rubble and gutted buildings are at the disposition of art, to protest against corruption and to develop a cultural resistance on the lines of the Banksy murals, in a land continually oppressed by the Taleban. The work with which the group won the Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani Anti-Corruption Excellence Award is a mural with great eyes that watch and interrogate us. They are flanked by a phrase that is a possible conclusion to this exhibition: “I have seen your corruption which is not hidden from the eyes of God, though you seek to hide it from the people”.
The leitmotif of this room is Rome. Three female artists approach in different ways the theme of a city whose destiny has often entwined grandeur and corruption. Emblematic from this point of view is the work of Elena Monzo, on the right. With a style that manages to be both delicate and hard-hitting, she elaborates the symbol of the Eternal City – the she-wolf. Below the shewolf, we do not find the celebrated twins, but three naked female figures, suggesting the image of a new Babylon, accentuated by a vestal virgin, a neo-Salome, who offers her services, reclining in a niche. Marica Fasoli’s work, on the other hand, evokes a famous episode, bordering on the incredible, that took place when Papal power In Rome was at its apex. It is a present that Manuel I, King of Portugal, gave to Leo X in 1514, an extraordinary albino elephant called Hanno. When the king’s “present” passed through the streets in a procession, it was a real triumph. In 1962, during works in the Giardini del Belvedere, some workers discovered the remains of a great jaw and an enormous fang. Only at the end of the 1980s did the historian Silvio Bedini succeed in reconstructing the story and linking these remains to the elephant Hanno, who did not last long In Rome and died in 1516. The elephant, of which the Pope is said to have been very fond, became a symbol for the degeneration of papal power, all too ready to yield to the flattery of European potentates. A symbol, too, of the deep corruption that aroused the ire of the pro-Lutheran circles. The publication of the Theses and the protestant schism were just round the corner. Placed higher up, and deliberately kept separate, as if watching and interrogating a Rome torn between two earthly powers, imperial and papal, is the work by Adele Ceraudo. This is a photograph – taken by Matteo Basilé – in which the artist poses on the cross. Here, too, is a clear reference to the episode of corruption that brought about the crucifixion of Jesus.
A more pertinent setting could not be imagined for the work of Annalisa Pirovano, who examines the theme of the relation between sexuality andpower. Her work takes up a subject that has always been greatly loved byartists: “Susanna and the Elders”. It is the story of a young and beautiful girlwho is surprised by two older men who are visiting her husband’s house. Thetwo “elders”, recently appointed judges, first importune her with obsceneproposals, then, faced with her resistance, accuse her before her husband ofadultery. Pirovano imagines the scene inside a vintage bathroom, bringing upto date the Bible story and bringing it in line with collective erotic imagery.Her work is therefore a reflection on sex, power and corruption.
Regina José Galindo’s video, La verdad, certainly provides one of the most intense and dramatic moments of the itinerary. It is a famous work, exhibited in 2013, and it censures the degeneration of power under the Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt. The artist is sitting at a school desk, reading declarations by women victims of rape and trickery during the Guatemalan civil war. Her action is interrupted by a dentist who periodically injects an anaesthetic in her mouth, reducing her capacity to formulate the words. Her reading is therefore transformed into a mantra, pronounced with enormous difficulty. In spite of the systematic attempt to censor her voice, represented by the figure of the dentist, the artist continues to speak regardless, though her voice is broken, her lips swollen, and the words come more and more slowly. Thus, the artist’s body become the unit with which to measure the despotic pressure of power. It takes upon itself the atrocities suffered by the collective body.
Another global excursion is to be seen in this room on the first floor. Two artists, one Italian, the other American, take up the theme of South Africa yesterday and today. Yazmany Arboleda, originally from Columbia, now lives in New York, where he has developed “living sculptures” projects with the potential to change the world. In South Africa, he has set his sights on the question of buildings left empty by political and economic power. The action narrated by the drawings exhibited at Casa Testori concerns the Central Business District of Johannesburg, where nine buildings were marked one night by splashes of pink paint on their façades. Pietro Ruffo, on the other hand, has taken a look at the country’s past. The artist’s work is based on an analysis of two different pre-revolutionary moments in the history of South Africa, and is the result of a residency project at Johannesburg. The first period is 1650, before the arrival of the Dutch. The second period refers to the end of the 1980s, characterized by the revolts that preceded the end of apartheid. In the first case, Ruffo the artist reworks Dutch prints. In the second, he uses protest banners which acted as authentic arms against the regime. “Before a revolution, before the time when something changes, people have one single idea of freedom and that idea of freedom is very strong in their minds”, declares the artist. The leitmotif of this room, therefore, is the analysis orgeneration of mechanisms that lead to change.
The ascent to the first floor of the house is marked by an emblematic cycle, created by the Chinese artist and film maker Zhang Bingjian. The title, Hall ofFame, is ironic. In reality, it is a “wall of shame”. Bingjian commissioned a group of artists to provide 1,600 portraits of Chinese public officials accused of corruption. Launched In 2010, it is an ongoing project, continually updated. Bingjian has brought to Casa Testori a small selection from this enormous gallery of corruption. Emblematically, the artist had all the portraits painted in pink on pink, the colour of the Chinese 100-yuan banknote.
