© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

Let's start from the beginning: Romanzo Meticcio is your new project and it will be exhibited at the Ragusa Foto Festival. It has been selected for the MIA Fair prize and it's still ongoing. What about the title? "Romanzo" means history: who are the protagonists? "Meticcio" tells us something about race and migration. Can you explain more about this?

Davide Degano (DD): Let’s start by saying that Romanzo Meticcio studies the Italian post-colonial condition as a fundamental element of the daily and contemporary life of the Bel Paese. The prefix "post" takes on a progressive historical value. It becomes a tool that invites us to critically evaluate the legacy of empires and carefully observe its effect on contemporary society. The title of my project is inspired by the novel of the same name written by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed. The book focuses on the true story of the Italian-Somali Isabella Marincola, mother of Mohamed and sister of the gold medal partisan Giorgio Marincola. Right from the start, I thought the title was perfect for my work. It briefly but precisely describes what Italian identity is for me. "Romanzo" means history but it is also a novel. "Meticcio" tells us something about race and migration but also the intersection between different cultures. I give you a small example of my idea of Romanzo Meticcio. I was born in Sicily and grew up in Friuli, Italy. My paternal grandparents are Slovenian by birth, and my maternal grandparents are from Colombia and Sicily. My grandmother Olga was born in Slovenia. By the time she was 20, the same land had become Italy (Friuli). The same applies to my birthplace Sicily. Is it Italy? 150 years ago, Sicily was part of the Spanish empire, and not long before was part of the Ottoman Empire. These two regions, so poles apart, at the same time share many cultural and historical similarities. Both have always been placed on the sidelines and considered culturally distant from the new nation that was born with the advent of fascism, but also after its fall, with the birth of the Italian Republic. Both have always been seen as culturally backward and not considered important for the industrial growth of the country. All of the mentioned above is set in the modern Italian landscape. We still ignore the fact that we are a postcolonial country. And as a consequence, we are still influenced by fascist ideology and doctrine. We just do not fully realize and admit that.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

We can say that your project is a work on the skin too. People portrayed are tattooed, or black or white and they "wear" their skin like history. That's also related to a particular concept: the exotic and its ambiguous meanings. What do you think about it?

DD: I do not want to seem naif when I say I was surprised to acknowledge that the word exotic is used to talk about human beings. As I mentioned my family comes from different hemispheres and within it are co-existing different cultures hence I have never heard the word exotic to describe a human being. I became more aware of that word while studying at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Netherlands. Several professors use it often to indicate anything that seemed far away from their daily life and culture. In particular, people with different skin tones or physical aspects.
I found it quite absurd because Dutch society is incredibly multicultural and a person defined as exotic might share with you the same culture and values, more than a white person coming from another European country.
Regarding the Italian case, this element becomes even more fascinating to study and analyze to understand the difficulty we have with accepting multicultural. Until the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, the other European powers considered the Italian people to be inferior precisely because of their race, as witnessed in Risorgimento and post-humanitarian texts. Italy occupied a subordinate position to other Western European powers and suffered a racialization of its emigrants.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

Another interesting element is that the Italians themselves were not seeing each other as united. I try to explain better what I mean. Until the unification, the peninsula was constituted by several reigns different from each other in landscape and culture. The first time we can find the use of the word "Italian" in literature is from Petrarca during a journey abroad (1304-1374). It means to me that there was not a real understanding of what could be defined as Italian identity, yet abroad Petrarca found some common features that lead him to define the people living in that landscape as Italian. According to my studies, Mussolini introduced on large scale the idea of race and the superiority of the Arian race over the others. As a consequence, the fascist government began to use the concept of whiteness not only to indicate the biological superiority of one individual over another but also to underline how whiteness corresponded to an element of cleanliness and good hygiene. This concept in contrast with the Meditteranean nature of Italy was also carried forward after the fall of the fascist regime. I recently came across the TV commercials of Carosello as Calimero, the little black chick.
This ideology of whiteness as a sign of purity was in contradiction with the southerners too. But also with the standards of beauty that were being born in the 1960s and 1970s. Having dark skin was a sign of high status in society, as you could afford summer holidays (la Bella Vita). At the same time, if your skin got too dark it was a sign of class subordination, as you were most likely a farmer or a person from the South. All these elements are very important for me to study as they denote an intrinsic multicultural character in the Italian population. However, fascist propaganda brought to life a narrative far from the truth and that persists to this day.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio' 

There's another important word that's part of the project: colonia. In Italian, it signifies a piece of space that has been occupied for someone to change it. During fascism, it had a positive meaning, to say a place that became part of the Italian empire. What about today? How did you represent it in your pictures?

DD: As mentioned above, the post-colonial era in Italy appears less recognizable and still little known. Nevertheless, numerous visible traces testify to this legacy. The architecture, the infrastructure, and the education started, indeed, with the term colony, which in Italian culture takes on multiple meanings. It refers to overseas possessions, the Italian communities of emigrants abroad, and the lands reclaimed during the fascism period that gave birth to the Città di Fondazione (New Towns) that caused a large internal migration. It is a term that, like a prism, reflects the evolution of cultures and geopolitical and environmental changes. Furthermore, the term colony in our culture can be associated with two completely conflicting ideas. In the case of emigrants, an idea of freedom and spontaneity. In the case of the imperial colonies, it takes the meaning of subjection and coercion. However, I would like to stress that the idea of freedom in emigrants refers especially to modern emigrants. That is young people looking for opportunities abroad. Clearly, the first Italian emigration to Brazil, Argentina, and Australia to name a few, had very little "spontaneous". But it is very interesting to note, unlike other colonial powers, as colonialism and emigration are processes that developed in parallel from the beginning of the construction of the Italian state.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

How did you compose your work? Who are the people portrayed and why did you choose them? 

DD: In Romanzo Meticcio I ask myself a simple question: What does it mean to be Italian? The project was born from the need to better understand my family’s cultural background. I was born in Sicily and raised in Friuli Venezia Giulia, in the far North. My maternal grandparents are Colombian and Sicilian, while my paternal ones are of Slovenian origin. I always start my projects from a personal perspective, exploring my surroundings. The people I portray are just a consequence of this attitude. I portray people that are part of my family, and friends, and then I usually extend the narrative ending up in houses of friends of friends, etc… Everything starts in an organic way and I let it develop naturally.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio' 

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio' 

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

Your work is on the margins. We can say that State power is built starting from the exclusion of a part of the population and Romanzo Meticcio is a way to give voice to marginalized people. A postcolonial thinker, Chakravorty Spivak, wrote a book titled Can the subaltern speak?. Your project is a way to answer this question. What do you think about it?

DD: The Italian state, since its unity, has created a narrative based upon the identification of places and people considered marginal. It is not re-evoking history but reading its meanings and evaluating its impact on current political issues that intersect with the social development of the country: the suburbs, the south, minorities, and second-generation Italians. In this work, I also want to analyze how the photographic medium in the 1930s was a fundamental tool to justify the new fascist colonial policies based on racial segregation and to represent certain situations as marginal. Photographs became a performative act of exclusion. Who photographed these realities? What was the audience? And for what reason?
Romanzo Meticcio tries to actualize and change this narrative by overturning marginality. It does it by placing at the center what is marginalized, not identified, little represented, scarcely considered, and to give back to the photographic medium its quality of inquiry that does not bring with itself propaganda purposes.

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

© Davide Degano from the series 'Romanzo Meticcio'

What are the main references for your research?

DD: This project was strongly influenced by the work of Davide Forgas and by his research entitled Italian's margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). A very complex research study divided into 5 search categories which, however, makes you understand very well how the current Italian condition is not easy to study and identify in the "classic" categories of the postcolonial because of its complex and multicultural history. It is a volume I would highly suggest reading and studying.

Davide Degano (website)