Contact zone in ruins: silencing and memories from the Colonial Exhibition of Naples in 1940

Abstract

My goal in this article is to explore the survival of the occidental racist exhibition tradition of colonial and universal exhibitions, that exposed the exotic in relation to the supposedly white civilized European. I have as my main object the Colonial Exhibition of Naples, the memory produced (or not) about this event on the actual website of the expositive complex, and the contemporary repercussions in debates about the restoration process of the old Colonial Exhibition. The central questions are: How the colonial past could be left out in speaking about the actual expositive complex Mostra d’Oltremare? How does this occur even in discussions about space restoration? What makes this colonial past agency? The methodology adopted to address them is a documentary analysis of the sources and their images in the form of a montage, in light of reflections on thinking through images and montage by Samain (2012), Bruno (2009), and Warburg (2010).