Intervention in Spaces of Amnesia #2 questions forms of idolizing the memory of fascist colonial criminals in today’s Italy. In August 2012, in the small village of Affile near Rome, a mausoleum was built in honour of its former citizen Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist war criminal responsible for atrocities against the anti-colonial resistance in Libya and Ethiopia. Repeated protests and action have failed to bring about the closure of this mausoleum even to the present day.

This work is the outcome of a double projection where an image of the mausoleum in Affile, which I visited in August 2013, is overlaid with the projection of the film “The Lion of the Desert” that was censored for almost thirty years in Italy. The film realized by the Syrian-American director Mustafà Akkad visualizes not only the violence and crimes of the Italian army in Libya under Graziani’s leadership from 1929–1931 but also the anti-colonial resistance, which was led for several decades by resistance fighter Omar el-Muktar. Screening of the film in Italy was banned in 1982, one year after its release: Giulio Andreotti, the prime minister at the time, justified this ban by arguing that the film constituted an insult to the Italian army.