Gaddafi in Rome: Dissecting a Neocolonial Spectacle Crafting a genealogical strategy for an accountability-based framework

This practice-based research project has developed a set of tactics for the dissection of a twentyfirst-century media event that spectacularised neocolonial relations between Italy and Libya. Through a situated and genealogical approach, it proposes a strategy based on accountability for analysing sensitive political events that require a complex approach, capable of engaging with the extended timelines and continuities of imperial politics. This is achieved by engaging with Critical Discourse Analysis, Media Event Studies, investigative aesthetics, post and decolonial theory. Framed by an investigation into the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya, this research focuses on the Italian press documentation of the meeting between Silvio Berlusconi and Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi in Rome (2009). These materials (a photograph and a collection of live news updates) are the departure for the production of a series of experiments that translate the essay film form into other media: a performance-lecture (Gaddafi in Rome: the Expanded Script) and a three-channel video installation (Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film). Based on the format and language of screenplays, this body of work highlights the spectacular character of the meeting, thus exposing how neocolonial spectacles (a concept developed in this research) are performed and narrated. Rooted in the essayistic – a metafilmic and reflexive format – it translates and sheds light on the temporal structure of contemporary, instantaneous news forms by addressing their gaps and lacks and exposing their colonial biases. Through a personal, reflexive point of view, it proposes an accountability-based framework that can counteract the Italian nation’s nonperformative (Ahmed, 2006) attitude to accountability. A wide array of found material (referred to as archive of coloniality) is analysed through an approach inspired by the early history of medical and public dissection, which is inherently spectacular, discursive, demonstrative, and pedagogical. Through the symbolic deployment of dissection, and the subversion of its normative and disciplinary framework, the practical outputs are predicated on the tension between the topical (the news and its spectacle’s surface) and the systemic (neocolonial politics and colonial memory).

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