Abstract
This article offers a critical reading of the first major attempt to publicly come to terms with the presence of an invasive and ideologically charged fascist monument in the border town of Bolzano-Bozen, in South Tyrol, Italy. The ‘Monument to Victory’, commissioned by Mussolini and inaugurated in 1928 to celebrate the annexation of the province after WWI, is the symbolic centre of a discourse that divides the town along an ethno-linguistic axis. To this day, this creates ongoing political tensions, fostering extreme views in both Italian and German speaking communities. To neutralise this symbolic power while preserving its supposed artistic value, a permanent exhibition inaugurated in 2014 inside the artefact tries to offer an historical explanation and contextualisation, and foster a new, inclusive and democratic discourse around the past. This article discusses this exhibition as a counter-monument, which directly challenges the ideology of the original. In interpreting the scientific aims and choices of the historians involved, and the architectural and curatorial strategies, it questions their dialogical underpinning discourse. The results lay bare an agenda to establish the site as a new monologic myth of origin for the democratic town of the future; one that aims at producing a ‘democratic and reconciled’ citizen through a prescriptive perlocutionary experience.
Highlights
This article provides a close reading of ‘BZ ’18-’45: One Monument, One City, Two Dictatorships’, a public permanent exhibition inaugurated inside the fascist ‘Monument to Victory’ (1926-1928) in the Italian border-town Bolzano-Bozen in July 2014
‘States’, Sandford Levinson has written, ‘always promote privileged narratives of the national experience and attempt to form a particular kind of national consciousness, yet it is obvious that there is rarely a placid consensus from which the state may draw’.5. In this area, moving from the seminal work of Pierre Nora in the French context,[6] we find mourning practices mapped across specific countries, as in the work of Paul Ashton, Paula Hamilton and Rose Searby in Australia, with their categorisation of non-war memorials, communities of mourning, transformations and relationships with evolving public discourses.[7]
In the area of European war iconography after World War I,11 which is closer to our analysis, are specific works on Fascist spectacle and propaganda,[12] and the growing sub-discipline devoted to the history of public monument of past dictatorships
Summary
This article provides a close reading of ‘BZ ’18-’45: One Monument, One City, Two Dictatorships’, a public permanent exhibition inaugurated inside the fascist ‘Monument to Victory’ (1926-1928) in the Italian border-town Bolzano-Bozen in July 2014. The object of our research – a fascist monument in the context of its contemporary use – has continuities with analyses of current interventions on/around monuments of a dictatorial past: the so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung and construction and performance of specific sites in new and democratic ways.[13] Our approach, is partially different The circumstances around both the building of the Monument to Victory and the opening of the new exhibition can be usefully explored through Atkinson and Cosgrove’s argument[14] that public monuments are a strategy to test, propose and impose a particular discourse on the public through architectural means. We will show what particular idea of visitor is implied in this process, and the ideological agenda behind the proposal of a ‘correct’ way to understand the fascist artefact in the context of the recent history of the region In doing this we adopt approaches and methodologies deriving from literary/textual studies and theories of historiography. We hope that this will offer an original interdisciplinary contribution that can orient further work
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