Ghosts for the Present: Interventionist Practices and Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italian Art

Recent practices in contemporary Italian art have situated creative work as a means of postcolonial critique for the present, often using visual, textual, and performance-based interventions in public space to shed light on histories of Italian colonialism and its imbrication with xenophobic and racial violence in Italy today. Artists and creative practitioners such as Wu Ming, Fare Ala, and Resistenze in Cirenaica have, for example, been actively waging a so-called “onomastic guerrilla war,” using interventionist practice to subvert legacies of Italian fascism and colonialism in the built environment. While the discourse on postcoloniality in Italy has spanned decades, the recent proliferation of these practices at a moment of intensified neo-fascism, xenophobia, and racial violence in Italy and broader Europe merits closer attention, as they stand to change understandings of postcoloniality—specifically, as this paper discusses, through revision of countercultural practice.

Through formal and social art historical analysis of postcolonial critique and collectivist practice in these works, with specific attention to Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s recent collaboration—the video, mixed media, and performance work Viva Menilicchi! (Long Live Menelik! 2018)—this paper argues that colonial memory, largely absent in popular discourse in Italy, is positioned as revisionist countercultural form in contemporary Italian creative practice. This paper finds that the legacies of countercultural aesthetics and collectivism associated with 1960s and 1970s Italy, explicitly referenced in Wu Ming’s early work, find a correction in the postcoloniality their work articulates in the present, expanding discourses on postcoloniality, countercultural aesthetics, and collectivism in turn.