Isolated Memories: Remembering (and Forgetting) Colonial Deportations from Libya to Italy

The Exhibition

Europe has a troubled relationship with its colonial past, and so does Italy.

The colonial legacy symbolically permeates Italian cultural, urban, and political spaces. However, this influence is seldom acknowledged and thoroughly articulated. When colonialism is discussed in mainstream discourse, it frequently serves to reinforce overly positive narratives about Italian colonizers as 'good folks', thereby hindering critical reflections on the colonial past.

As several scholars have observed, Italy’s colonial memories are unarticulated, displaced and scattered. They tend to reproduce Eurocentric and revisionist narratives of the past by celebrating Italian colonialism as a positive mission, while conveniently overlooking the routine violence of colonial rule. Colonial deportations from Libya are just one of many examples of such violence.

This online exhibition seeks to visually explore the traces - or absence - of the past presence of Libyan deportees in former deportation sites (namely the military prison in Gaeta, the Tremiti archipelago, Ponza, Ustica, and Favignana). The materials featured in the exhibition include pictures of plaques and monuments that somehow memorialise colonial deportations from Libya to Italy through various narratives and languages (English, Italian and Arabic). Furthermore, the exhibition includes pictures of buildings that housed and detained Libyan deportees on the islands, as well as sites where they worked while ‘exiled’. Additionally, the exhibition includes pictures depicting the former military prison in Gaeta, now accessible through guided tours. Hundreds of Libyan deportees were sent to Gaeta between 1911 and 1912, yet unlike the islands, there are no plaques commemorating their past presence there.

Today, the islands of Ustica, Ponza, Favignana, and the Tremiti archipelago stand out as some of the few places where Italy’s colonial violence is somehow acknowledged and remembered. This recognition is primarily attributed to the installation of various plaques and monuments commemorating Libyan deportees, which were erected on the islands mainly in the early 2000s. These initiatives were part of a joint Italy-Libya research program focused on colonial deportations.

Do these monuments and plaques effectively articulate and memorialize the routine violence of the colonial system? Do they feature the voices (and language) of the victims of this system?Should the past presence of Libyan deportees be more prominently displayed in former sites of confinement?

The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate these questions and consider the role of physical memory sites in prompting reflections on colonial histories and their enduring impact. By treating local memory work on colonial deportations as "isolated memories," both literally and metaphorically, the exhibition seeks to shed light on the persistent displacement and silencing of colonial memories at the national and European levels. As observed by some scholars, the forced movement of individuals from Libya to Europe during colonial times is highly evocative of current migratory routes that link the two shores of the Mediterranean. These (deadly) routes are the result of daily practices of segregation and racism imposed by Europe that inevitably recall the colonial period.

In this sense, the exhibition implicitly asks: "Who gets to remember colonial deportations in the present time?" As mentioned above, the erection of plaques and monuments on the islands is mainly due to the encounter between (Italian) local and national actors and Libyan actors throughout the 2000s. For decades, the legacy of Italian colonialism in Libya was a key element in the troubled relationship between Italian governments and Muammar Qaddafi. This explains the joint Italy-Libya research program funded by the Italian government to address the colonial dispute, and thus the presence of commemorative plaques and monuments on the islands. In addition, until 2010, dozens of visitors from Libya, many of them descendants of deportees, had the opportunity to visit former sites of confinement and pay tribute to the deceased. In the present time, this happens very sporadically: the demise of Qaddafi’s regime has inevitably put aside the colonial question, which seemingly bears no relevance to the current relationship between Libya and Italy. Furthermore, the EU’s increasingly strict visa regime does not allow Libyans to easily travel to former sites of confinement. Therefore, the memory sites explored in this exhibition remain highly inaccessible to Libyan communities.

The exhibition also engages with the voices of some local community members. A dedicated section highlights key reflections from an online workshop, where members of different communities tied to former sites of confinement reflected on how colonial deportations are both remembered - or forgotten - locally and nationally.

By engaging with local voices, the exhibition does not wish to replace or silence the voices of the victims of colonial violence. Memory is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and this exhibition aims to capture the local dimension of memory and oblivion of colonial deportations, while acknowledging that the silencing and under-representation of the voices of the victims of European colonialism is a key symptom of the persistence of colonial dynamics in the present.