“We’ve been educated to understand we must approach an image with a healthy amount of skepticism. Part of that skepticism means recognizing that when an image documents a particular element, there is another element that it could have documented, but didn’t. The presence points towards an absence.”
Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. These concerns derive from lived experiences: Petros is an Eritrean emigrant who spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. The overlapping cultures, voices, and tenets of this constellation produced a dispersed consciousness, global and transnational in stance and outlook.
Among the awards he’s received are a Terra Foundation Research Fellowship, an Art Matters Fellowship, and Artist Residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the McColl Center for Visual Art, and the Addis Ababa Photo Fest. Recent exhibition venues include Oslo Kunstforening, the 13th Biennial of Havana, Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace, the Studio Museum in Harlem; the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, the Medina Galerie Mediatheque in Bamako, Mali, the Lianzhou International Photo Festival in China, and many others.
Dawit L Petros spoke with Darren Lee Miller via Zoom on Thursday, September 8. 2022.
Dee Miller: I think your journey as an immigrant to Canada – as a refugee of the 30-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia – provides important context for understanding your work. Would you be comfortable sharing a bit about your journey and how you arrived where you are now?
Dawit L. Petros: Absolutely. We left in the middle of the protracted war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. We embarked on a long journey from East Africa and eventually arrived in Canada as refugees. The physical, cultural, and geographic displacement is not just part of my biography, it is one of the most important sets of conditions that produced my understanding of the world. My work and the research underpinning it are intended in large part to help me understand these experiences. I am comfortable talking about this especially in this moment when anti-immigrant rhetoric that fuels so much cynical politics is ascendant.
Miller: Is a white supremacist ideology against immigration taking hold in Canada, too? It’s certainly a problem here in the United States, but I didn’t know if rising illiberalism was also infecting our neighbor to the north.
Petros: I would say yes but I think the intensity may be different. The attempts to control mobility are rooted in ideologies of the Western nations that have historically monopolized access to resources and capital and are now attempting to fix people where they are.
Miller: And especially now that climate catastrophes are causing mass migrations. Anti-immigrant sentiment surprises me but I suppose it shouldn't. Anyone who looks like me and lives on this continent obviously has ancestors that came from somewhere else. My mother's family immigrated from Naples, Italy at the turn of the last century, and I guess you could say they were economic refugees. But I don't want to suggest my family's experience was in any way equivalent to yours. And certainly, the movement of Italian settlers to African colonies like Eritrea bestowed an enormous amount of privilege on the imperialists that wasn't shared by the people already living there. Even the language we use belies that inequality: expatriate versus colonial subject. In the book chapter you shared with me prior to this conversation, writer Theresa Fiore cleverly plays with the possible double meaning of the word (pre) occupation, and you use that word in at least one of the titles of your works. Please expand on the possibilities of those ideas and how they come to play in your work.
Petros: Fiore describes how “pre-occupation” used with a hyphen refers to how people, places, and objects we connect with contemporary immigration are already marked by previous histories of colonialism and emigration. This meaning is contrasted with “preoccupation” without a hyphen, which Fiore describes as the feeling of anxiety that the presence of “others” induces. These two sets of meanings are at the heart of my research and work. I am investigating how the displacement of Italians from their own historical memory of coloniality and migration impacts their contemporary relationship to African refugees traveling to Europe through Italy. How have the latter who traverse the Mediterranean become a stranger to Italians, when a plethora of historical material exists to show there was a time of greater familiarity between these communities? The work occupies the space between these two sets of preoccupations: one that says there is no physical space on this land for you, and another that says, this story about you and about the other has already been constructed. What do you do in that space? What do you do in the gap between?
Miller: I'm curious to hear you talk about the idea of the gap in the piece that we're showing in Beeler, The Constant Retelling of the Future in the Past. It looks like you’re using archival images that you sort of slice and build into these carefully constructed sequences. Describe your research practice for making this piece, and explain the histories of migration and politics that you intend to bring to the forefront with that work.
Petros: The Constant Retelling of the Future in the Past, Parts I and II use photographs produced between 1890-1937. Part I contains images produced in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya. These show the streets full of cars, the Fiat Factory, an engine room of the Teleferica, architectural models of agricultural villages in Libya, and land cultivated by the indigenous labor. Part II depicts scenes including Italians leaving for life in North America, celebrations and public events. They also show the labor and infrastructural works through which Italian laborers contributed to nation-building in Canada. Therefore, the images were produced in one instance by the Italian colonial project in Africa, and in the other the immigration process of Italians arriving in North America. How do we read and understand images that were produced in order to substantiate Italian superiority, in one context, versus Italian inferiority in another? So the young Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somalian immigrant who arrives on the shores of Italy today is not a stranger at all because in many ways what they represent is the return of these repressed Italian histories. I modified the original documents in various ways, first elements from particular images are extracted, rescaled, and re-situated into proximity with other images or even removed altogether. Second, abstract black bands of varying dimensions are inserted among the composition. So a single photographic image is re-situated within an expansive horizon that recalls the mobility of cinema or the photographic contact sheet. These interventions highlight gaps and absences in the photographs in an attempt to interrogate their original functions and assumptions of neutrality.
Miller: I've never thought about it this way until right now. Your work is showing me the multiple ways in which our personal stories intersect. My mom's family immigrated to work as stonemasons. They helped build parts of Pennsylvania and New York, and they were proud of that; but also, when my parents were married in 1969, even then it was still considered a mixed marriage by custom if not by law because whiteness had not yet been conceptually expanded to include my Italian-American, Catholic mother, at least not in the eyes of my Protestant grandparents. Today I benefit from the subsequent expansion of whiteness that includes someone like me. I don’t mean to make this so personal…
Petros: A thoughtful conversation can be destabilizing because it undermines the seeming certainties of the positions we occupy. Many Italian Americans are not familiar with these intertwined histories, and this is the triangulation I'm interested in: the historical movement of Italians to North and South America is connected to the historical movement of Italians to East Africa, and those are connected to the contemporary movement of young Eritreans and other Africans into Italy. It is worth noting that prior to Mussolini and the fascists, Italy referred to their immigrant communities in North America as colonies, and the project in Africa was meant to “repatriate” Italians in America to colonies in East Africa. My work examines how, if we're to understand future formations, we have to do it through knowledge of historical formations. It's not about bridging the gaps. What I want to do is to highlight gaps that offer spaces to question and think.
Miller: We’ve already mentioned the underpinnings of othering that are tied in with the colonial project. And we’ve both shared a little of our personal histories. I feel like it's important here for me to acknowledge that you and I have been friends since 2004. We went to grad school together in Boston. I remember back then, a number of us including me presumed your creative practice was primarily about blackness. And I've got to say, looking back, I'm embarrassed by my own racism, by how I oversimplified and made assumptions about something I didn’t truly understand while presuming I did. My students and I had a dialogue last week about this quote from Carrie Mae Weems: "I think that most work that’s made by black artists is considered to be about blackness. Unlike work that’s made by white artists, which is assumed to be universal at its core." I don't know if you want to respond to this, but I thought I'd bring it up.
Petros: Yes, the presumption is if you are black in the United States your work is about blackness and more precisely, American blackness. When I was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at SMFA, Boston, I taught a class on American racial imagery called “Deconstructing Whiteness.” I wanted a space for me to learn and articulate my relationship to American notions of race and blackness while setting boundaries for my graduate peers and my faculty cohort, “This isn’t black work, just because I'm black. What Carrie Mae Weems is pointing to is absolutely spot on. And, when people correctly assume work to be dealing with blackness, it is frequently reduced to a predictable kind of experience of blackness. I've spoken in other places of the fertile capriciousness of blackness, not just as a subject, position, but as a political category. When my work is seen as operating within a space of blackness, I in no way presume that equates it with a lack, or absence of complexity. I think it's expansive and complicated.
Miller: When Tim and I were considering which works to include in the show in relation to the images that NASA sent on the Voyager spacecraft, we felt it was essential to point to absences. It's very telling to see what was and wasn't depicted in that particular time capsule that we sent out into space, who wasn't included, and how “the other” was considered. The things that weren’t said speak powerfully about what was valued. It sounds to me like that's one of the ways that you're thinking about these elisions or omissions, like blank spaces in our cognition.
Petros: We've been educated to understand we must approach an image with a healthy amount of skepticism. Part of that skepticism means recognizing that when an image documents a particular element, there is another element that it could have documented, but didn’t. The presence points towards an absence. There are many things we do not see in a photograph, even when it's plainly in front of us. How can the occupation of gaps become an artistic strategy? I’m curious about what we do with it rather than just attempting to fill it.
Miller: Please explain some of the nuts and bolts of your research and ideation process. How do you gain access to these images? And then, how do you build ideas from there? Or maybe it is the other way around?
Petros: I am working with material that I started collecting in 2012. There are too many archival collections to mention. The central ones that I have been working with in Eritrea are the Pavoni Library and the Asmara Heritage Project in Asmara. In Rome, I have conducted research at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Geographical Society. In Chicago, I have completed research work at Northwestern University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, The University of Illinois at Chicago’s Special Collections Department, The Florence Bartolomei Roselli Library, The University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, The Art Institute of Chicago Archives, and The University of Illinois at Chicago’s Special Collections Department. In Montreal, Canada, I have consulted with historical documents at The National Archives of Quebec in Montreal, the Archives of the City of Montreal, and the Italian community archive housed at the Casa d’Italia. So the repositories range from academic and governmental entities to community sources and personal archives. Images from my own family don't make their way into these things, but they do inform my work.
Miller: In my lectures I often say that our architectural and interior design choices are some of the ways in which we display socioeconomic status, national identity, and our aspirations. These indicate how we want others to see us, and even more importantly, how we wish to see ourselves. In terms of Italy’s fraught projects abroad, both in its African colonies and in the other countries where Italians settled (like Canada), there’s a kind of writing, erasure, and rewriting that is enacted by the buildings. Fiore calls them “examples of cultural palimpsests.” What questions are raised for you when you place images of these far apart places directly adjacent to one another? Or when you block our view of someone’s face with the mirrored reflection of a landscape or industrial site?
Petros: My interest in this project from the outset was built forms, especially architecture and infrastructure. I then began to include publications and journals. I was invested in how these objects manifest and shape cultural presumptions and ideologies. They tell us a great deal about the values which underpin the establishment of an empire and the formation of an imperial subject. A focus in the larger project is a building in Montreal that was built in 1936 by the Italian community. The Casa d’Italia is a space that reflects the intersection of Italian Canadian migration stories with inter/national narratives because of the broader social forces that shaped both its construction and subsequent events. The aesthetics of the building highlight architecture’s role as a social microcosm in which national fissures, dreams and aspirations take shape. In examining the building’s language, what is revealed are stylized Fascist icons in the interior and exterior of the building. By rendering the language of its construction visible and connecting these to the historical conditions that produced them, it becomes the connective tissue to buildings in Eritrea which, in the present, continue to reflect a strong Fascist iconography. I am interested to know how these buildings in Eritrea are forms whose meanings are potentially not so overly determined that one cannot redirect them. Though they bear the visual markers of their origins they have been re-codified to also mean something else. They are now the emblems of an independent country. This does not obliterate the problematic histories of empire, fascism, and colonialism. All forms have to have the possibility of being rewritten, reoccupied, redirected. This type of logic makes its way into a lot of the other work in my project. For example, the highly visible figures standing with mirrors in the landscape offer an incompleteness which allows spectators standing before them a space to enter the work.
Miller: The title of your ongoing series Spazio Disponibile can translate as “vacant space” or “available space,” and recalls Italy’s colonial projects in Africa. As an American viewer living in Ohio, it also calls to mind the violent history of my country’s westward expansion into previously occupied lands. Right now, I’m standing in a place that, less than 200 years ago, was home to the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. The ways in which we rationalize our contemporary presence here depends upon a self-serving form of amnesia. And I think that the economic system we participate in – one that sees the living world outside of humanity as nothing more than a stockpile of natural resources, and “human resources” – leads rationally to fascism, or at the very least, to authoritarian regimes. Some might say the Eritrean dictatorship since 1993 is one of the fruits that grew from the seeds of Italy’s fascist, imperial interventions. I know these are separate and complicated things, but I was wondering how you see these threads I’m attempting to interweave.
Petros: That’s a lot, but I'm happy you framed the early part of the question by at least acknowledging and recognizing the land you’re on. I think all too often, especially in academia, when we talk about decolonizing the museum and decolonizing the curriculum, we fail to recognize that we must begin by decolonizing the land. This has to be where it begins, with an absolute acknowledgement that a significant amount of the territory on which the United States and Canada is built must revert back because the claims have never been settled. These are unceded territories.
Miller: That’s basically what Dr. Dori Tunstall, Dean of Faculty at OCAD said when she delivered the President’s Lecture here at CCAD last fall.
Petros: To the latter part of your question, fascism in our contemporary moment moves through the epistemologies formed through the liberal tradition of the Enlightenment project. Imperialism and colonialism are part and parcel with the post-renaissance knowledge that “illuminated” the western world. Part of what I'm doing is learning that the nativist projects, the fascist projects, the anti-immigrant projects, and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism we are witnessing have historical precedents.
Miller: I hear people talking about liberalism and fascism as if they’re in diametric opposition when in fact, they seem pretty tied together.
Petros: This is an important point, especially within the context of Italy because the displacement of Italy's colonial history is predicated on the notion that they overthrew the fascists. They disavowed the fascist project, therefore they wiped their hands clean of it. The reality is that many of the worst excesses of the Imperial colonial project began during liberal Italy, and the fascist project is a manifestation of many of the beliefs and ideologies carried over from the liberal project.
