Whose Barbarianism? Exhibiting Antifascism, the Resistance, and the Holocaust in Postwar Italy and Now

The article discusses how antifascism, the Resistance, and the Holocaust have been exhibited in Italy since the end of Mussolini's regime. It uses the exhibition ‘Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,’ held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018, as a starting point to evaluate curatorial practices in the immediate postwar period. The author positions ‘Post Zang’ as a culmination of a curatorial tradition of Resistance shows, which have their roots in the mid-1940s. To this end, the author performs a close reading of the 2018 exhibition and its individual objects, casting a spotlight on the historical complexities that curator Germano Celant and his team largely elided in wall texts, the catalogue, or other interpretative materials made available to audiences. Through the interpretative framework of the 2018 Milan exhibition, the article highlights two issues: how fascism absorbed and neutralized political dissent by endorsing a relative artistic freedom; and how the Resistance became, in the immediate postwar period, a dominant narrative, which marginalized the Holocaust and promoted a redemptive interpretation of Italian victimhood, which partly absolved the Italians from both collusion with fascism and the Holocaust. This narrative blurred, absorbed and partly obfuscated testimonies and artistic narrations of the Holocaust, thereby in effect using the Holocaust instrumentally to the creation of anti-Nazi narratives of the Resistance.