Patrizio Di Massimo

Patrizio Di Massimo’s Oae, 2009, takes its title from the Phoenician name for Tripoli, an allusion to Libya’s long history of colonial rule. In this thirteen-minute video, the Italian-born artist travels to Libya to examine the legacy of nearly thirty years of Italian dominion, from 1911 to 1940, and uncover an eradicated past, a history scorned and forgotten. It begins with the authoritative voice and documentary gaze of the newsreel. As the narrator decries Italy’s colonial ambitions, a line of soldiers fires at Libyan resisters, who immediately fall to the ground. Though ostensibly authentic, this material is in fact fiction, borrowed from the 1981 film Lion of the Desert by Mustapha Akkad. In another sequence, what seems to be archival black-and-white footage of a Libyan highway is actually Di Massimo’s own video work, shot on an overcast day in 2008. As the light shifts, subtle coloration suddenly becomes evident, and the reflection of a dashboard appears. This strange melding of past and present, of truth and fiction, evokes correspondences, as well as a liminal, unresolved temporality.

Whereas few remnants of modern Italian rule remain (having been destroyed or painted green, Libya’s national color), Roman ruins, like the exceptionally well-preserved seaside city Leptis Magna, endure. Di Massimo overlays slow-zoom shots of that city’s monuments with Fascist-era popular music. Filmed in high definition, these shots of golden-hued stone against bright sky seem overly saturated and hyperreal. Compared with the parenthetical subtitles Di Massimo uses to trace Fascist Italy’s phantom presence—identifying Boulevard Omar al-Mukhtàr as Omar but also as Sicily, a reference to its former name, Corso Sicilia—these vestiges appear acutely present.