Images and "Interesting subjects" from the Colonies. Archive, Memory and the Conctruction of Otherness at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin

Abstract

Recently, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University Of Turin (MAET) started a process of reordering its archive and of digitising its photographic collections. Among the latter stand out three albums from the 'Carlo Vittorio Musso' collection, containing 111 photographs produced between 1920 and 1923 in Italian Somalia. After years of “oblivion”, the museum’s archive reveals images linked to a corpus of ethnographic objects from the Italian colonies, which connect the cultural heritage to the collective memory and to the imaginaries and narratives on otherness. The 'rediscovery' of these albums and the 'along the grain' investigation of archival documents and photographic collections question the MAET's past and present use of images from 'elsewhere' and its co-participation in specific narratives concerning the construction of the national identity. The biographical approach to both objects and images and the reconstruction of the story that led them to the MAET allow the start of a process of decolonisation and the recognition of those subjectivities that, for too long, have had no voice in public, political or scientific representation.