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

Giulia Morale

This research project charts artistic networks in the western Mediterranean region, especially between Italy and North-West Africa. It aims to situate Rome as a space of convergence of Mediterranean politics, culture and art in modern history. Select artists 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 and the 1970s. These decades witnessed profound changes in the body politics of the wider region. The anti-colonial movements that unfolded across North Africa, especially those involved in the Algerian War (1954–62), had significant reverberations among Italian intellectuals, particularly those who were affiliated with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). So did the nationalization of the Suez Canal (1956); the radical movements of the 1960s that spread across the Arab world in the form of pan-Arabism or Arab socialism; and the events that led to oil crisis in 1973. This project contributes to a revision of Rome, and Italy more broadly, as a center of Southern modernity, rather than a periphery of Euro-American canons.