Daniele Marzorati

The subjects Daniele Marzorati deals with in his Atlante del corpo coloniale (Atlas of the Colonial Body) are real, lived-in, tangible and cumbersome bodies. It is a poetic and delicate investigation into the traces of Italian colonialism in natural history museums, archives, herbariums and botanical gardens. In these anachronistic places, the artist focuses on the heads or parts of taxidermied animals or on samples of exotic plants collected in different parts of the world in the early 20th century. Off the darker to the lighter #2, the large analogue black-and-white photograph created for the Cairo Prize, is also part of this research. The subject is the taxidermied head of an elephant killed during a safari in Kenya in 1939 by Italo Balbo, then Governor-General of Libya. Initially displayed in Tripoli as a trophy, the object arrived at the Natural History Museum in Udine in 1956, donated by the widow of the fascist leader, and it was here that it was photographed by Marzorati, with a framing and spatial context that amplify its appeal and symbolic power. Completely decontextualised, in a close-up shot against an anonymous and hyper-civilised background of shelves, boxes and archive sheets, the elephant head triggers a series of reflections on colonial history and its roles of power, on the relationships between object, space and time in an image, and on the possibilities, both aesthetic and semantic, triggered by their subversion.

Manuela Brevi