This KNIR Research Dialogue takes as its point of departure a series of ephemeral displays curated by architect and designer Carlo Enrico Rava at the “Mostra Autarchica del Minerale Italiano” in Rome (1938) and the Milan Triennale (1940). In the two exhibitions, Rava used material culture, as well as photographic montages and plants, to stage environments that invited visitors in Italy to experience the life of a (European) itinerant colonial officer or professional, such as a mining area, a camping site, or a caravan.
Unlike other exhibitions that represented Italy’s occupied territories or displayed its looted heritage, Rava’s simulated spaces encouraged spectators to immerse themselves in colonial life, erasing violence while reinforcing race ideologies. Drawing on methodologies derived from exhibition history and material culture studies, this Research Dialogue interrogates these “simulacra of empire” to address how they were shaped by, and in turn shaped, Italian colonial imaginaries.
About the speaker
Laura Moure Cecchini is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Padua. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and has taught in Mexico and the United States. Her research focuses on the transnational legacies of fascist visual and material culture. Her book Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and the Construction of National Identity, 1898-1945 (Manchester University Press, 2022) interrogates the recovery of the Baroque in the early twentieth century. She has also worked on Latin American modernism and the history of exhibitions in the entreguerre. Her work has recently appeared in Studi di Memofonte, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, and Modernism/modernity, and was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Villa Medici-Académie de France, the National Endowment for the Humanities, CIMA Center for Italian Modern Art, and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
© square image: Vincenzo Aragozzini, “Mostra autarchica del minerale italiano- Interno del padiglione Africa italiana- atrezzatura da carovana,” Roma, 1938. Source: Centro per la cultura d’impresa, Edison (Milano), Lombardia Beni Culturali.
© banner: Vincenzo Aragozzini, “Mostra autarchica del minerale italiano- Interno del padiglione Africa italiana- atrezzatura da carovana; tenda e strumenti di prospezione,” Roma, 1938. Source: Centro per la cultura d’impresa, Edison (Milano), Lombardia Beni Culturali.
