Omar al-Mukhtar (1885 – 1931) was the leader of the organised resistance against the Italian colonisation of Libya (1911 – 1943). He became the symbol of Libyan people’s resilience and has been greatly celebrated and exploited both by Gaddafi’s regime and the armed groups currently fighting over the control of the Libyan territory. In Italy, his name remains unknown – yet, it briefly appeared in the media during Gaddafi’s first visit to Italy in 2009. Sight Unseen explores the concealment and appropriation around the memory and documentation of Mukhtar’s final days and spectacularised state killing through analysis of visual and material culture that has been subject to either manipulation or obfuscation in Italy. These materials include the most complete – but legally unpublishable – series of images of Mukhtar’s capture and execution; Mukhtar’s contested glasses and purse, the Hollywood production The Lion of the Desert and Monumento al Carabinire, a memorial to Italian armed forces in Turin. In this way, Sight Unseen attempts to portray the carefully orchestrated politics of visibility and invisibility that shape the memory of colonial trauma in Italy.

The work tests the viewer’s patience and expectation by never fully revealing the images that are being described. The voiceover, however, is able to evoke the images and enables the creation of a mental image in the viewer. By doing so, it attempts to overcome the censorship over such images that, because of a copyright limbo, cannot be published. As a result of this ban, they cannot act as proof to this historical event that dictated the end of two decades of Libyan resistance to the Italian occupation, nor can they make visible the sheer and calculated violence at the core of this operation. The spectacularisarion of Mukhtar’s execution also provides evidence of the role played by visuality in asserting colonial violence.

A Bomb to be Reloaded is a long-term research project articulated through a series of collaborations and outputs. It was born out of a chance encounter with the history of Giovanni Pirelli and, specifically, an interest in his involvement in Third-Worldism in Italy. In particular, what struck my attention was his friendship and collaboration with the Martiniquan psychiatrist and decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. Indeed, starting from Pirelli, the project aims to investigate the influence of Fanon’s thought on a generation of militant intellectuals in Italy. If, on one hand, the project wishes to ‘reload’ this influence by making it relevant in the present, it also strives to maintain a position of criticality towards these issues. Pirelli’s life and work, though, offered the ideal framework and critical approach. Following his involvement in the resistance against Fascism in the Second World War, Pirelli refused his predestined role at the head of the Pirelli industrial dynasty to dedicate his life to cultural and political activism. As the historian and archivist Mariamargherita Scotti suggests in Vita di Giovanni Pirelli (2018), given the radicality of this choice Pirelli was often forced to explain his motivations, so much so that he reiterated it in several pieces of writing targeting different contexts. These passages display a striking lucidity, selfanalysis and criticality that became a pivotal element in the project. In the exhibition, they were present as inscriptions on mirrored surfaces and in the form of  collages, printed on textile banners, which were realised by the students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, who were involved in the initial stage of the research.