About

L’Orecchio Teso L’Occhio Sordo (The Tense Ear, The Deaf Eye) is a curatorial practice-as-research project, reflecting on how we can imagine new ontologies and ethical practices that allow us to engage with colonial ethnographic photography portraying Black female bodies. 

Originating from the analysis of the former-Colonial Museum photographic collection in Rome, known as IsIAO, this project emerged from a biographical need to define belonging and the pressing necessity to understand such heritage, which has contributed to racist ideas of nationhood. The urgency was prompted by the 2021 reopening of the IsIAO ethnographic collection within the walls of the anthropological museum ‘MUCIV’ (Museum of Civilizations) in Rome, coupled with the uncritical online access to the photographic collection at the National Library of Rome.

This research introduces an alternative museum interpretation methodology for colonial ethnographic photography, termed 'creolization of epistemologies,' which is exemplified in the concrete form of the piece titled 'Adwa.’ This piece consists of an intimate autoethnographic dialogue with a girl’s portrait in one of the photographs part of the IsIAO collection. Without a disregard towards historical, this interpretation explores the oral and the affective as decolonized methodologies, challenging ocularcentrism and promoting epistemologies based on other senses. Words and sounds serve as mediums to engage with knowledge, fostering an empathic connection with the subject portrayed in the photograph. This exploration encompasses issues of racialized national identity, belonging, and the experiences of mixed-background second generations, while also exposing how racist constructions can manifest physically. The aim is to prevent the perpetuation of colonial violence while revealing continuities from the colonial past into the present and, ideally, initiating a process of healing.

Informed by African and Black scholarship such as Hampâté Bâ, Oyěwùmí and, Hartman and Campt’s “Listening to Images,” this interdisciplinary research intertwines museum studies, sound studies (Howes; Stirling), sensory ethnography (Linn), sound therapy notions, and neuroscientific simulation of the vagus nerve. Informing this approach are Menakem Reesma’s trauma therapy principles, which encourage the acknowledgment of discomfort as a means to challenge privilege and confront racism. This focus on the audience experience aligns the piece with the Reparative Aesthetics: raising awareness of injustice and discrimination while tending to emotional processing. Adwa incorporates post-representational, affective, and experiential forms, urging an active audience for holistic, relational curation transcending mere information.

The project has also been influenced by dialogues with afro-descendent artist and thinkers based in Italy such as Justin Randolph Thompson, Simao Amista, Raziel Perin, Patrick Joël Tatcheda Yonkeu, Binta Diaw, Muna Mussie, Ofelia Balogun, and Jermay Michael Gabriel Yhonas. Their different knowledge and practices allowed me to depart from a normalised western view of knowledge and to change my approach towards the collection but also helped me to deal with my own issues about belonging.

This interdisciplinary research departs from the intersection of contemporary art practices, philosophy and postcolonial museum studies and creative writing. The scope of the research supports a decolonized approach to archival and museum practices.