Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya
Book launch
October 18–31, 2024
Villa Romana is delighted to announce the publication of Alessandra Ferrini’s first monograph Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya. Featuring Ferrini’s long-term research on the colonial and neo-colonial relations between Italy and Libya through a critical engagement with the Italian ‘archive of coloniality’ and its structural violence. The book includes documentation of Ferrini’s major project Gaddafi in Rome, whose last iteration is currently exhibited at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa, as well as a series of works reflecting on positionality, censorship, and the erasure of the genocide perpetrated by the Italians in Libya.
Building on the artist’s interest in writing, translation, and collaboration as forms of resistance practice, it brings together different voices and visual materials, putting forward a reflection on the ethical dimension of cultural work. As a result, the book includes original contributions, reprints, and translations by writers, scholars, curators, and practitioners pivotal to the development of Ferrini’s work and thinking.
Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya includes a preface by Bassam El Baroni and contributions by: Tewa Barnosa, Adam Benkato, NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, Chiara Cartuccia, Sarri Elfaitouri, Amalie Elfallah, Khaled Mattawa, Maaza Mengiste, Barbara Spadaro, Daphne Vitali. Published by Archive Books, the book will also be supported by the release of materials for online access both in English and Italian language on the publisher’s website as well as on Villa Romana’s new website.
In 2018 Ferrini presented the performance-lecture Gaddafi in Rome: the Expanded Script in Villa Romana, as the first iteration of her project. Since then the dialogue between Ferrini and Villa Romana continued uninterruptedly, renewing itself in the framework of the current curatorial programme of the institution: A House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing.
The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide. Thus, the publication will be presented at a series of partner organisations:
October 18, 7pm at Depo, Istanbul
Alessandra Ferrini in conversation with Daphne Vitali and Marina Papazyan and presentation of the artist’s film Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film.
October 22, 7pm at Triangle-Astérides, Marseille
Alessandra Ferrini in conversation with Chiara Cartuccia and presentation of an extract from the artist’s film Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film.
October 24, 5pm at L’Art Rue, Tunis
Alessandra Ferrini in conversation with Chiara Cartuccia and presentation of the artist’s film Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film.
October 29, 6pm Villa Romana, Florence
Alessandra Ferrini in conversation with Elena Agudio, Mistura Allison and Barbara Spadaro and presentation of the artist’s film Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film.
October 31, 6pm at MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki
Alessandra Ferrini in conversation with Daphne Vitali and presentation of the artist’s film Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film.
Alessandra Ferrini is a visual artist, researcher and educator based in the UK. Questioning the legacies of Italian colonialism and Fascism, her work experiments with the expansion and hybridization of the documentary medium. Winner of the Maxxi Bvlgari Prize 2022, she has exhibited internationally, including at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts London.
