There is an exhibition on Italian colonial architecture in Libya—but nobody is talking about it

In 2009, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi visited Italy to meet then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, wearing a photo of Omar al-Mukhtar on his chest: the leader of the Libyan resistance whom the Italian fascist colonists hanged in 1931. On the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, Berlusconi expressed “on behalf of the Italian people” his apologies for the wounds caused by the colonial period, committing Italy to provide Libya with five billion dollars in investments as a form of compensation.

Sixteen years later, in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, an architecture exhibition tries to follow up on that call for confrontation: “Postcolonial Reclamations: From Al-Berka to Sidi Hussein,” held at the Barah Gallery, focuses attention on the role of architecture as a tool of conquest—and as a means to rewrite history.

The curation is by Jawad Elhusuni, founder of JE-Architects, who has been working for years on the relationship between architectural form and postcolonial memory. He explains to Domus the idea behind the exhibition: “Reclamation stars from knowledge – it’s important to know why certain decisions were made the way they were”. In essence, to intervene in the present, one must understand the design choices of the past.

Jawad Elhusuni

He recounts that in 1932, Italian architects Alberto Alpago Novello, Ottavio Cabiati, and Guido Ferrazza were commissioned to draw up a master plan for Benghazi: they praised the 1914 plan, which provided “clear separation of our city from the native city”. And with the new plan, they wanted to accentuate this separation. It was a true “architectural apartheid” that filled the city with ghetto-like neighborhoods and checkpoints for Libyans. One of these—Al-Berka—is at the center of The Secret Casket, one of the works on display that best summarizes the silent violence of colonial urban planning. Raneem Benfadhl transforms an intersection of Italian streets into a small garden with hidden fountains, inspired by the water landscapes of eastern Libya.

“Without knowledge of history, you can never really propose something significant. To reclaim is then to subvert this troubled history – changing forms, changing materials, changing the purpose of streets themselves from tools of control to transparent vistas of participation”, concludes Elhusuni.

Ten designers look at ten buildings that fell from the sky for them, buildings they have had to confront since childhood—the ghosts of the colonial past.

In The Protagonist, Islam Alfallah designs a school in the Al-Berka neighborhood, whose façades are gradually covered by an invasive plant, Ipomoea indica: a symbolic gesture showing how even rationalist colonial architecture is powerless in front of nature. Palm Station by Saif Elhasi replaces the cement of Benghazi’s old station (now demolished) with palm wood, a local and “primitive” material in the colonial logic. The Mud School by Ali Alnaas starts from Benghazi’s red soil, rich in iron and clay, to explore the use of mud as a structural material—in dialogue with the research of Lina Ghotmeh and Diébédo Francis Kéré.

Rukayya Gargoum’s La Stazione revisits the Benghazi Central Station, built by the Italians, and proposes the reconstruction of this and other historic monuments “as they were”, reinventing only the interiors—as happened in Warsaw during post-World War II reconstruction.

Among the most poetic projects, Kaleidoscope by Suha Albarasi reimagines a school through the eyes of a child, with colors and geometries inspired by the drawings of British illustrator Quentin Blake.

The exhibition also includes realized projects, such as the one by Elhusuni’s studio for the redevelopment of Piazza Maydan al-Shajara, the urban heart of Benghazi, which during the Italian colonial period was renamed Piazza Cagni. Thanks to JE-Architects’ project, the square has today regained not only its original name but also a new architectural dignity: Carrara marble was replaced with North African materials, in a gesture of symbolic and posthumous reclamation of the central hub of Italy’s colonial project in the city.

Another project highlighted by Elhusuni is by photographer Ali Elyadry, who created a series of images dedicated to the abandoned mills of the Italian company Reggiane in Benghazi’s port area. The Reggiane Mechanical Workshops, one of the main Italian mechanical industries between the two World Wars, produced everything—from airplanes to locomotives and farm machinery—and also had a significant presence in Libya. “When Elyadry found out that Reggiane (which only recently became defunct in its Lombardy headquarters) also made aerial bombers” Elhusuni recounts “it changed everything. There are so many layers of unresolved history between Libya and Italy”.