© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024 

When we think of the word "photography," one of the concepts associated with it is fixity—the still image. In cinema, the film reel is made up of many frames, moving at a more or less constant speed (from 24 to 30 fps – frames per second). Freezing a significant moment allows the photographer to extract an instant, lasting only a few seconds—if not minutes or hours—from an uninterrupted flow, making it meaningful: the representation of someone or something.

Davide Degano, with his Romanzo Meticcio, has carried out this kind of operation and offers us a snapshot of contemporary Italy at a time of right-wing political resurgence. This narrative through images is compelling both for its content and its historical relevance, transforming the past into a déjà vu that reappears to the eyes of today’s viewer. New and archival photographs alternate to tell the story of Italian colonialism in Africa and the ghosts it evokes in today’s Italy, which is increasingly multiethnic and globalized. Portraits of young people, second-generation Italians, and photographs of the suburbs alternate with documents from the past—family images that evoke the photographer’s personal history of internal migration. All of this is accompanied by testimonies of contemporary nostalgia for the fascist regime, when everything was ordered by a single mind and projected toward a prosperous and "extra-white" future.

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024  

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024 

This collection of still images leads us toward a complex picture, one that tells us of a world made up of a thousand alternatives, in constant transformation, where the flows of people, ideas, and habits change the social composition and deny, every day, the possibility that there is, as there never has been, a single identity representing the contingency of the nation-state. Degano's project, much like cinema, transforms the static image into a narrative of movement and metamorphosis. It embraces the complexity of the contemporary world and turns it into history. The story that emerges is, indeed, a novel (romanzo)—one made up of places, people, and generations that confront their time, interpret it, and live it as a second skin.

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

In this context, miscegenation represents the emblem of complexity and the porousness of borders—borders that are often glorified and cherished by those who wish to defend them. The hostility toward those who cross these borders, as well as toward those who, like each of us, change the structure of generations and societies from within, represents an attempt by those who fear the unknown of diversity to build a falsely secure nest in which to live. The fixity of ideals such as God, Fatherland, and Family, which the right-wing firmly champions, is based on a static view of alterity, in which the foreigner, the "other," is deliberately cast into a dangerous, barbaric identity to be purged and excluded.

To provide a more nuanced picture, as is the case in Romanzo Meticcio, of some of the processes driving the contemporary revival of these ideals, one must look back to a historical phase—Italian colonialism. It represents a key moment of confrontation between a newly formed "Italian identity," exalted by the fascist regime, and the otherness of the places subjected to domination. 

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

It is not new that Italian colonialism has been portrayed as a “soft” conquest, more humane and tolerant (Tabet, 1997). As Angelo Del Boca reminds us in Italiani, brava gente? (2005), it began in a period prior to fascism, as early as the late 1800s, with some expeditions in Eritrea and the occupation of Albania during World War I. Even at that time, the idea that Italians had arrived in the conquered territories with civilizing intentions, bringing benefits to the native population, served to distance the conquerors from an image—one that was imposed and never fully overcome—of themselves as lazy and decadent (Del Boca, 2005). It was during the fascist period, however, that all of this was exalted by propaganda, and the civilizing narrative helped to obscure the crimes perpetrated against the colonized peoples, both in Africa and in the Balkans. The Italian mission abroad, therefore, appeared to be more a march of redemption than an imperialist and economic conquest.

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

In this perspective, the colony represented a place of otherness, physically distant, where soldiers arrived to offer civilization and labor, and where the encounter was framed as a confrontation and clash between those who were more “evolved” and therefore possessed “knowledge,” and those who, being black, incomprehensible, and different, were still living in a constructed and imagined “savage” state. 
This led, for example, in Africa, to a true policy of racial segregation perpetrated by the fascist regime “in defense of the dominant race” and for the “prestige of the race.”

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024 

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024 

© "Romanzo Meticcio" by Davide Degano. Artphilein, 2024 

From an initial static and naturalized image of Italian colonialism as "good" because it was perpetrated by people who were, by nature, good, there followed another static image: that of the other as an inferior race.

In this clash of fixed images, political history today emerges in the postures and attitudes of individuals in the power struggle, which narrate and explain the relationships of oppression they experience daily. Italian colonialism, freed from the negative and criminal narratives that characterize other European colonial histories, has thus become the "great repressed," and continues to be accompanied by an unresolved confrontation with the racist ideology, which remains latent in Italian society. This is evidenced by the white/positive and black/negative polarizations that can still be found in advertisements, such as the 1960s Calimero commercials. The project described in La pelle giusta by Paola Tabet is further proof of this. In the 1990s, children from all schools in Italy were interviewed about their relationship with otherness, with black skin, and with those who are different from them, during a period when international migration was increasing. The association between blackness and dirt, in contrast to the whiteness and purity of the "white," was made clear and explicit in statements such as:

If my parents were black, I wouldn’t hug them, I wouldn’t cuddle them. If my parents were black, I wouldn’t let them take me to school by hand. (Paola Tabet, La pelle giusta, p. 106)

Colonialism is not only presented as a historical period with geopolitical consequences in the contemporary world, but it also crystallizes a set of attitudes that turn stigmatizing and discriminatory narratives into political propaganda. In this sense, the image of the Empire as a place of culture—still dominant today—becomes fixed and unyielding. The photographic project presented here immerses us precisely in this perspective, prompting us to reflect on the inherited paths of our history that have never been fully processed. It challenges the present and offers an open and candid view of the new generations, exploring how they might shape the future of Italy.

© Davide Degano from the series "Romanzo Meticcio"

Those who stand at the intersection of the Empire and their own familial and cultural history have internalized this boundary, making it a significant part of their everyday experience. Refugees, for example, gradually begin to live according to the script required by institutions in order to be granted refugee status, so that the State will accept and incorporate them into a difficult and still stigmatizing process (Khosravi, 2019). Similarly, second-generation youth express their fragmentation through rap lyrics or by overturning the paternalistic and dehumanizing logic of integration, as in the text Restare barbari. I selvaggi all’assalto dell’Impero (2023) by Louisa Yousfi, who writes:

"The white world is a rotten apple. It contaminates everything it touches. Non-Whites don’t suffer from the fact that they can’t enter it, like little worms. They suffer from having to bite into it, because they know that doing so means deeply rethinking their most fundamental values, it means having to give up their soul, because it is the soul that resists integration. […] It is not the lack of integration that is defined as 'barbarism' but the very process of integration." (translation from author). 

Those who have offered themselves to the lens of Romanzo Meticcio speak to us, look at us, and express their position in history—as others, as actors of their future and the society in which they live, full of contradictions, while still engaged in a process that is far from complete.

Bibliography

Del Boca Angelo (2005), Italiani, brava gente?, Neri Pozza
Khosravi Shahram (2019), Io sono confine, Elèuthera
Lombardi-Diop Cristina, Romeo Caterina (2014), L’Italia postcoloniale, Le Monnier Università
Tabet Paola (1997), La pelle giusta, Einaudi
Yousfi Louisa (2023), Restare barbari. I selvaggi all’assalto dell’Impero, Derive e Approdi

Davide Degano (website)
Romanzo Meticcio (book)