Ethnic minorities in Italian cultural institutions

Abstract

In summer 2020, after the protests for George Floyd’s killing, the activism movement Black Lives Matter gained international attention spreading from the US to other countries including Italy. The protests questioned the dominant Western gaze and put the accent on the way we represent the world in our Western museums. These events, along with a growing attention on matters such as decolonisation of culture and inclusion, had a significant influence on the analysis of the roles of ethnic minorities inside the art world both as producers (artists, story-tellers, curators) and consumers (visitors). This dissertation aims to understand how, in the context of decoloniality and under the influence of Black Lives Matter activism, ethnic minorities find a place and are represented as producers and consumers in the contemporary art system and specifically in museums. The purpose is to analyse more in detail the Italian context, focusing on three different Italian cultural institutions that at different levels had tried in the last years to find disparate ways to include and represent people coming from minority groups and living in Italy The present dissertation is based on a review of the literature on post-coloniality and decoloniality and on the decolonisation of cultural institutions, on articles about the Black Lives Matter movement and on the analysis of some case studies of museums that put in place experiments aiming at including and representing cultural minorities inside the art system. The results of this thesis demonstrate that while in the US and in UK the dialogue, the studies and the statistics around this theme are quite developed, in Europe and, specifically in Italy, we are still at the beginning, but many cultural institutions, from bigger and public ones such as the Uffizi Gallery to smaller and private ones such as the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, are trying to face these issues and to include people with foreign origins in their project both as producers and consumers.