Hidden Legacies

“It is a fascist empire, an empire of peace, an empire of civilisation and humanity.” These were the words of Benito Mussolini after the colonisation of Ethiopia in 1935. The dictator was speaking only half a century after the Kingdom of Italy invaded the East African country of Eritrea, marking the start of the country’s empire. Comparatively, this desire to conquer other nations came late when we consider other European nations. It formed part of a drive to ‘modernise’ and the official political line was one of civility and the ‘good solider’. In reality, it is estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonisation, almost one million people died due to war, deportation and internment. There are well-documented instances of war-crimes by the military, including the use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia. Visual artist and researcher Dawit L. Petros experienced the legacy of these atrocities in his formative years growing up in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Kenya. His work explores the impact of Italian colonialism on visual cultures, populations and built environments across the world. Now, a new exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Photography is the next step in this career-long investigation. The exhibition is a stark reminder that the legacy of colonialism ripples out across the world and continues to shape lives today. 

Central to Prospetto a Mare is Chicago’s buried links to the Italian Empire, namely in the form of a statue with a controversial past. Walk east of the city’s famed Solider Field stadium and you’ll find Balbo Monument. It is an ancient Roman column gifted to the city by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in homage to fascist aviator Italo Balbo. He directed a squadron of seaplanes that flew to Chicago during the 1933-1934 World Fair. Inscriptions in English and Italian evoke ancient Roman splendour while commemorating the historic flight and Italy’s Fascist government. Public statues have been proven, time and time again, to be a reflection of contemporary values and are often a lightning rod in times of political unrest or protest. Consider the toppling of Edward Coulston in Bristol in 2020. The bronze figure of the slave trader was torn down during an anti-racism protest, causing outcries of both celebration and horror. For some, including Prime Minister at the time Boris Johnson, who described it as a “criminal act”, it was a direct attack on history. For others, it was a definitive rejection of a society too permissive of institutional racism – both historically and in a contemporary context. Much of what this exhibition concerns itself with is memory, collective and individual, public and private. In remembering the perpetrators of violence, but neglecting to honour those affected, modern societies fail to recognise the enduring legacies of colonial rule. Petros’ work rails against this understanding of the past, instead encouraging viewers to question fixed narratives of culture, migration and power.

Just one year after the Chicago fair, a variant of the Savoia-Marchetti S.55 planes that Balbo’s squadron flew to the city were used by the Italian to invade Ethiopia. Petros uses this duality, between celebrated memory and hidden realities, as the foundation for his work. A new video Il Dominio Del Aria (The Command of the Air) uses aviation as its starting point. Kaleidoscopic imagery follows the journey of the pilots, with areal footage that expands and contracts into itself. It suggests a complex history of the locations and follows in the artists’ tradition of considering migration as an impact of colonial occupation. Sounds immerse the viewer – lyrics to popular Eritrean songs lament the distances that planes impose between loved ones, a voice reads a letter written by an Italian pilot to his father in Naples describing the first recorded dropping of bombs from an airplane in Libya in 1911. As Museum of Contemporary Photography curator Karen Irvine writes, the artist is unflinching in “directly linking Italy’s brutal colonial project with the sanitized celebration of aviation technology.” 

A historian and photographer by training, Petros is no stranger to the challenges of balancing artistic licence with fact. Photography has an ability to blur the lines between reality and fiction and throughout time has proven to be a useful tool of propagandists. The artists’ work is a reaction to this, foregrounding the lived experiences of those living directly under colonial rule, and the communities living with the affects in modern society. His series Between departures, returns and excesses of image (2021), removes the contextual backgrounds of images taken of Eritrean and Ethiopian warriors during the 1930s. He foregrounds how these pictures were used to ‘other’ African people, creating a romanticised, homogenous image of Africa. In stripping them of their background and placing them above a stripe of crimson, he diverts attention away from the illusion Italian photographers attempted to craft and uses the colours as a reminder of how colonialism stripped African countries of their identity and autonomy. The repercussions of these actions are navigated in Untitled (Epilogues) (2021-2024). In the series, young Eritrean men, man of whom are asylum seekers who fled Italy after not finding opportunity and safety there, stand in places significant to the history of colonialism in the Horn of Africa. They hold large mirrors on their shoulders, obscuring their faces and denying us the opportunity to see them clearly. They serve as a reminder of the disjointed nature of identity, and how it is shaped by location. In immersing ourselves in Petros’ work, we are reminded that the tendrils of the past reach into the present. 


Prospetto a Mare is at Museum of Contemporary Photography until 20 December: mocp.org

Words: Emma Jacob


Image Credits:

Dawit L. Petros, Untitled (Epilogues, XII), Northerly Island, Chicago, 2024. Archival pigment print, 30 x 37.50 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Dawit L. Petros, Untitled (Epilogues, XIII), Jackson Park, Chicago, 2024. Archival pigment print, 30 x 37.50 inches. Courtesy of the artist.