Decentering Italian Colonial Heritage

Project: Scientific event

Project participants

  • Schulz, Vera-Simone (Project manager, academic)
  • Gabriel, Jermay Michael (Project manager, academic)

Description

The restitution of objects from Western museums and the establishment of “new relational ethics” (Sarr/Savoy 2018) are among the most pressing and key topics of our times. Equally important, however, is the need to pay more attention to the built environment, considering the roles, lives, and afterlives of buildings, urban contexts, landscapes, and infrastructure. By examining their perception and the local narratives connected to them, we can overcome the weight of colonial and Eurocentric discourses and envision possible futures for these sites and buildings.
While much scholarly attention has been devoted to European, particularly Italian architects in the Horn of Africa and the architecture under colonial regimes, the embeddedness of these structures in local contexts and their roles over time has not been adequately examined. Iconic buildings like the Fiat Tagliero building in Asmara have been often analyzed from Eurocentric perspectives, neglecting local perceptions and narratives. This workshop series addresses these gaps by focusing on selected case studies across various Horn of Africa countries. It challenges dominant scholarly discourses by introducing counter-narratives and approaches from local, regional, and transregional perspectives, examining the micro, meso, and macro dynamics at each location, as well as mobility within and beyond the region.
The series is a collaboration among historians of art and architecture, archaeologists, literary scholars, anthropologists, curators, experts in critical heritage studies and critical museology, contemporary artists, architects, writers, and cultural practitioners. This multidisciplinary group is aimed to uncover the various layers, superimpositions, and stratifications of the built environment, investigating the lives and afterlives of buildings and the people who inhabit(ed) them, and the construction of new structures. Through a novel approach to well-researched iconic buildings, the workshop series and project focus on their afterlives, local appropriations, and the role of local actors in maintaining and inhabiting these structures. It delves into the interrelation of these buildings with their surroundings and the narratives they inspire, from storytelling and topologies to toponyms and literary urban ecologies. Additionally, the series and project bring to light lesser-known buildings and elements of the built environment, fostering a collaborative and comprehensive study.
The workshop series addresses issues of labor and the role of local architects, highlighting their networks and collaborations across the Horn of Africa and beyond. It will shed light on the participation of Horn of Africa architects in conferences, joint events, and exhibitions, especially focusing on older generations. This research involves new archival studies, including private and family archives and oral histories, revealing transregional connections. The series and project aim to address issues of memorialization, counteract asymmetries of knowledge production, and integrate diverse findings and interpretations. By doing so, they contribute to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of the built environment in the Horn of Africa, honoring local perspectives, histories and storytelling, and sounding out possible alliances between academic and artistic research. The workshop series thinks buildings together with people, objects, visual and material culture (e.g. photographs and postcards featuring architecture, the role of film, or that of (im-)mobile artifacts housed in built structures), their urban and environmental settings.

Decentering Italian Colonial Heritage, co-organized by Jermay Michael Gabriel and Vera-Simone Schulz, is part of the Epistemologies of Conviviality project at Leuphana University, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
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Researchers

  1. Tina Waschewski

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  3. Sozialarbeit in der Berufsschule
  4. Der Himbeerwurm
  5. Innovating entrepreneurial pedagogy
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  8. Über das Schreiben sprechen : Peer-Lernen in akademischen Schreibgruppen
  9. Evolution of entrepreneurs’ expectations using Instagram as a business practice: A transformative learning perspective in the case of sustainable fashion entrepreneurs in Mexico
  10. Interkulturelles Lernen anhand von Bildnarrationen.
  11. Kybernetik in Urbana
  12. Tatarenblut und Immertreu
  13. A Dollhouse as a Situational Context for Mulitplicative Reasoning
  14. Exploring the Poincaré Ellipsis
  15. Organization and Planning of Vehicle Utilization in a Chemical Firm
  16. Identification of ozonation by-products of 4- and 5-methyl-1H-benzotriazole during the treatment of surface water to drinking water
  17. Lineare Optimierung und Operations Research
  18. Key Audit Matters im neuen Bestätigungsvermerk
  19. Interactions of CaO with pure Mg and Mg-Ca alloys—an in situ synchrotron radiation diffraction study
  20. Cost Minimization in a Firm's Power Station
  21. Bewegung in die Schulen!
  22. Vorwort
  23. Performance Saga: Interview 04
  24. The Role of an SME’s Green Strategy in Public-Private Eco-innovation Initiatives: The Case of Ecoprofit
  25. Black Pedagogy 4.0: Art as a School Subject in the Wake of Competence Orientation and Digitalization
  26. Focus: (Re)productivity Sustainable relations both between society and nature and between the genders
  27. Grisebach, Eberhard
  28. Thinking, doing, organising
  29. Reaction of Calcium Chloride and Magnesium Chloride and their Mixed Salts with Ethanol for Thermal Energy Storage
  30. Das Itinerar der Dinge – Objekte und ihre Ordnung
  31. Alice: Metamorphosen einer weltliterarischen Figur
  32. Wertschaffendes Umweltmanagement
  33. Climate Change as an External Enabler of Entrepreneurial Activity
  34. Ecological and social outcomes of urbanization on regional farming systems