Oswaldo Bot and Libya: An Ethnographer of the Futurist Self?

Osvaldo Barbieri (1895–1958), better known as Oswaldo Bot, was an artist from Piacenza, active in the second phase of Futurism. After exhibiting a portrait of Italo Balbo at the 1932 Venice Biennale, he won the support of this influential Fascist hierarch. When Balbo was appointed Governor-General of Libya in 1934, he invited Bot to join him in Tripoli. This short first visit to Africa had farreaching consequences for Bot’s artistic career. In this essay, I shall use his journeys to Libya in 1934 and 1940 as case studies to demonstrate the extent to which colonial stereotypes impacted on his personal ‘primitivist’ aesthetic, how Fascist propaganda was entangled with his artistic perspectives, and how his travels shaped his personal impression of Africa. My focus is on the African scenes Bot created prior to his departure, informed by popular Italian perceptions of the continent, up to the works he produced in Tripoli and the imagery displayed at his exhibitions in Libya. Once back in Italy, the artist took advantage of his experiences to integrate himself into the world of Fascist propaganda. Bot’s Africa-themed oeuvre highlights the impossibility of clearly distinguishing between ‘primitivism’ and racism.