Romanzo Meticcio

Romanzo Meticcio interrogates Italy’s ongoing difficulty in accepting itself as a multicultural nation. Through my photographs in dialogue with archival materials, the work investigates how the present is shaped by Italy’s colonial past and by the layered histories of both internal and international migration. Rather than offering a linear account, it scrutinizes how events have been framed, remembered, and circulated across generations. Within this broader picture, Italy’s trajectory remains comparatively underexamined. Colonialism was entangled with national unification and the internal conquest of the South, yet public discourse has long minimized these legacies. Their visual and ideological residues persist, sustaining narratives that relegate the South, minorities, and peripheral identities to the margins. To navigate these layers, my approach is interdisciplinary and grounded in intersectionality, acknowledging the co-presence of different systems of marginalization. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s understanding of the archive as a structure of power, I treat historical photographs not as fixed records but as contested documents to be reactivated and reframed. In 1930s Italy, photography helped legitimize segregation and colonial rule; in my practice, it becomes a site of resistance, challenging the visual logics that produced exclusion. Romanzo Meticcio operates as a form of practice-based research, where image-making becomes a method of inquiry rather than illustration.