ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the exhibition as something else altogether, not only as the built expression of Italian colonial ideals and hierarchical relations of power, but also the unacknowledged colonial heritage of what have been often characterized as postmodern phenomena, that is, simulacra and simulation. The museum’s present-day simulacra have an antecedent in Italian colonial Libya at the Fiera di Tripoli, or Tripoli Trade Fair. This was a colonial exhibition staged annually from 1927–1939 in the city of Tripoli proper. The exhibition presents the illusion of cohesion of Italy’s colonial enterprise. It spatializes a via positiva of smiling subjects, fertile pastures, and unfettered progress that runs counter to the actually existing via negativa playing out on the ground. Almost all colonial exhibitions were built in Europe between 1880 and 1940, the height of European colonial imperialism, with the aim of expanding trade between metropole and colony, and increasing domestic support for such efforts.
