Digging Up Italian Colonial Past with Biennale’s Artist Alessandra Ferrini

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Some chapters of history are painful yet crucial to confront, especially as contemporary generations grapple with past atrocities. Biennale artist Alessandra Ferrini explores Italy’s colonial legacy in Libya through her book Like Swarming Maggots and a documentary.

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03/01/2025

By Giulia Piceni. Cover image: Alessandra Ferrini, Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship, HD video, 2024. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

When I think of Italian colonialism, I am reminded of an interview aired on the Italian public broadcaster RAI featuring journalist Indro Montanelli. In the interview, before any criticism for admitting that he purchased a 12-year-old “wife” in what was then known as Abyssinia, he stated, “I’m sorry, but in Africa, it’s a totally different story,” suggesting that abusing a young girl from another continent was somehow acceptable in a way it would not be in Europe. Proudly, he explained how she became his “wife”: he bought her for 500 lire (equivalent to about 7 euros today) along with a horse and a rifle.

This colonial relationship described here is an act of violence so normalised that it could be recounted casually on Italian television in 1969. This illustrates how trivialised the colonial tragedy was in Italy. Montanelli himself describes his colonial experience as a year spent riding through nature, surrounded by women and fellow soldiers, with few real battles to fight. Today, his actions, like those of many Italians from his era, can only be viewed as violence committed amid widespread indifference—a collective silence that contemporary artist Alessandra Ferrini seeks to confront and reveal through her practice, which merges documentary and essay forms. We had the opportunity to explore her work up close during a talk at Villa Romana last October, where the artist also presented her new book.

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Alessandra Ferrini, Gaddafi in Rome: the Expanded Script, performance-lecture at Villa Romana, Florence, 2018. Photo by Davood Madadpoor.

Who is Alessandra Ferrini? Exploring the Artist Behind the Biennale Work

Alessandra Ferrini, born in Florence, is a London-based artist, researcher, and educator. She received the Maxxi Bvlgari Prize 2022 and the Experimenta Pitch Award at the 2017 London Film Festival. More recently, she was also invited to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa in 2024.

Her practice focuses on lens-based media, (post)colonial studies, critical whiteness, and historiographical and archival methods. She investigates the construction of historical narratives and how the ideologies behind them shape both individuals and societies. With a unique dual perspective as both an insider and outsider to the Italian context, Ferrini examines Italy’s colonial archive, particularly its foreign and racial policies. Through a self-reflective and positioned approach, she experiments with hybridising the documentary form to address “difficult heritage,” resistance to systemic violence, and the need for historical accountability.
Using the ‘essayistic’ as a device—a mode of thinking that preserves the structure of the essay within an expanded field—her practice includes moving images, installation, dialogue-based formats, as well as writing, publishing, and education.

All about Alessandra Ferrini’s new book Like Swarming Maggots (2024)

The talk at Villa Romana provided the artist with an opportunity to present Alessandra Ferrini’s new book, Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya (2024), now available at select bookshops in Florence.
The book’s title is inspired by Angelo Del Boca’s review of the film The Lion of the Desert (1981). In his review, Del Boca acknowledges the tragedies caused by Italian colonialists and their attempts to conceal this shameful past, paralleling the film’s lengthy censorship. Italians buried this history, leaving it to the maggots to decompose. Yet, the artist noted that through this process of dissection, the soil becomes more fertile, creating a metaphor for her and the book’s contributors: a collective endeavour to unearth the past and enrich the present.

The book is divided into three chapters, or “acts,” drawing on theatrical terminology. The first act focuses on positionality—the social and political context that shapes individual identity—and examines how the history of Libya and Italy intersects with Ferrini’s family narrative. The second act addresses geopolitical issues, providing a detailed account of Italian colonialism. The third act discusses the often-overlooked Libyan genocide, aiming to present its historical narrative in a way that encourages reflection rather than reopening old wounds while connecting it to the ongoing tragedies of our time.

It’s movie time! Gaddafi in Rome: The Colonial Backdrop to Modern Political Deals

After her talk and the unveiling of her book, the audience was invited to experience one of the artist’s documentary-essay works firsthand. In the serene setting of Villa Romana, free from the urgency of moving between exhibits as in a museum, Alessandra Ferrini screened her acclaimed work, Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film (2022), which earned her the Maxxi Bulgari Prize.

The film is divided into three acts, reflecting the three days the Libyan Colonel spent in Rome while signing a bilateral agreement with former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This visit is portrayed through the comprehensive reportage of the centre-left newspaper La Repubblica, which documented every minute of Gaddafi’s time in Rome. Alessandra Ferrini was captivated by the cinematic quality of this material, using it as the structural backbone for her documentary.

The film unfolds over several scenes, starting with extravagant state dinners featuring a peculiar tricolour menu. It moves through student protests and culminating in Gaddafi shaking hands with Rome’s then-mayor, Gianni Alemanno, who was known for his sympathy toward fascism. These three days set the stage for new colonial agreements: Libya received infrastructure investment from Italy under the pretence of reparations, a form of dependence that Ferrini describes as a modern iteration of colonialism. Meanwhile, Italy benefited in multiple ways: there was a shift in its strategic image, improved relations with the European Union—an institution Italy had long perceived as superior—and, crucially for Berlusconi, an agreement that allowed Italy to return Libyan migrants arriving across the Mediterranean while ignoring the human rights violations they faced upon repatriation.

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Alessandra Ferrini, Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film, three-channel installation at Maxxi Museum, Rome, 2022. Photo by Roberto Apa. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI.

Ferrini’s film ends with rare footage from the 1930s, showing vast Libyan internment camps. Her message is clear: the human rights abuses and genocides of the past demand our ongoing vigilance. Under Italian fascism, the nation was aware of the events unfolding in Africa; however, after the fall of the fascist regime, the atrocities committed were largely left unaddressed, leaving a stain on Italy’s conscience. Even today, as history seems to repeat itself through recurring acts of violence, both the public and institutions remain largely indifferent, even when confronted with harrowing images of genocide.

Fields of Study
Art

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