Southern Modernities: Trans-Mediterranean Encounters in Rome, 1950s–1970s

Giulia Morale, Ph.D.

My research project charts artistic networks in the western Mediterranean region, especially between Italy and the North west Africa. It aims to situate Rome as a space of convergence of Mediterranean politics, culture and art in modern history. Select artist will include Carla Accardi, Agostino Bonalumi, Antonio Corpora, Toni Maraini, Abdelkader Houmel, Nja Mahdaoui, Mohamed Melehi and Jilali Gharbaoui, who all passed through, or lived in, Rome between the 1950s–1970s. These decades witnessed profound changes in the body politics of the wider region. The anti-colonial movements that unfolded across North Africa, especially the Algerian war (1954–62), had significant reverberations among Italian intellectuals, especially those who were affiliated with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). So did the nationalisation of the Suez Canal (1956); the radical movements of the 1960s that unravelled across the Arab world in the form of pan-Arabism or Arab socialism; and the events that led to oil crisis in 1973. Situated in this radical intellectual, cultural and political milieu, this project contributes to a revision of Rome, and Italy more broadly, as a centre of Southern modernity, rather than a periphery of Euro-American canons.