{ echoing }

Echoes from the “colonies” resound in “Casa del Mutilato”, where history is represented by the voice of the coloniser. One of the epigraphs, placed at the sides of the vestibule that introduces to the sacrarium, reports Mussolini’s speech at Palazzo Venezia in Rome: on 9 May 1936, Mussolini announced to Italy and the world the foundation of the Italian Empire. The religious function of the building is consecrated by Mussolini’s words that recounts a history of colonisation in name of the grandiose past of the ancient Rome.

The sound of the bombings coming from the “colonies” was never heard in Fascist Italy.
A sound installation could be a possible intervention to the Mussolini’s speech inscription, as a counter-voice that echoes the ghosts of the Italian past and opens to the possibility of making visible those narratives that have been mutilated in the official representation of the Fascist regime.
The proposed intervention would let us hear other voices, other sounds that flood in the cracks of History, allowing the colonial past to flow into the present, in a non-linear temporality that can criticize the incontestable monolithic and progressive Western idea of History.

The sound of the voices from the so called “Impero d’Etiopia”, in this perspective, can be considered as an essential instrument that may enable a repressed narrative to emerge as a disruptive element, whose unpredictable performance is always difficult to be controlled by the power, thus proposing issues of memory and its ownership.

Sound can have the power to make emerge cultural and historical resources that survive and resist, question and deconstruct the alleged unity of the present. Sound can be considered as expression of strangled realities in as much as its language is formulated and conceptualized on a deeper level where realities cannot find their place in an univocal and positivist concept of history.

– Anna Maria Furuland and Ilaria Lombardo