Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An In-visible Colony, 1890-1941 by Anderson Sean Dr

Author:Anderson, Sean, Dr
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

3

Modernità e Interiorità: The Interiors of Africa Orientale Italiana

The increase of the prestige of a Nation in the World is proportional to the discipline of which it tests the inside.1

Evidently, emptiness is not simply related to the absence of matter. A space on which nothing is built can be pervaded nonetheless by perceptual forces and filled with density, which we might call a visual substance.2

Beyond the dialectics of imperialism in Italian East Africa, interior, as a collocation of physical boundaries and disambiguated space within the private home rendered a fascist colonial modernism. The colonial interior may then be read as a discrete location for the production of modernity. A comprehensive image of the circuit from interior to exterior in Italian colonial architecture illustrates how populations under Italian authority were transformed by virtue of their representation within public and private spaces. The colonies themselves served as interiors within the sphere of Italy’s purview and were understood as operating both within and outside of the socio-political conventions of the time. Descriptions of the colonial interior appear minimally throughout divergent texts concerning Italian building to simply note a recapitulation of modernist architectural principles. There are even fewer photographic illustrations of the Italian modern colonial interior.3 More commonly, one finds a repetition of façades without any glimpse of what lies beyond them: any perception of the interior is rendered inaccessible, distant.

Central to a contemporary understanding of Eritrea’s architecture and urbanism is how the colonial interior evolved as a discrete space for the reception of persons bound by colonial dictates. Encounters linger, along with material remnants, testifying to the complexities of the colonial city and its interiority over time. This chapter considers both the colonial architect’s delamination of private spaces in the home and city along with the inhabitant’s subsequent furnishing of these interiors. Associating “a furniture of emptiness,” across scales allowed contrasting modes for the staging of agency. Vestiges of private life are a means of retracing the relationships introduced by the spatial orders extant across the built (and unbuilt) environments of modern Asmara.

Architecture and urbanism may be simultaneously modern and colonial. The forging of a colonial modernity in Eritrea began at the intersection of competing definitions of private space. Among historians of colonialism and post-colonialism, by comparison, spatial vocabularies are catalyzed by the disentanglement of subject-object relationships. The materialization of interior spaces, as a result, registers the emergence of power and its representations. Yet, the crossing of modernism with the colonial engendered an idiosyncratic interiority, one that undermined assumptions about the hierarchical forms present with the physicality of building. Equipped by the political agency of Italian colonial and later fascist motivations, architecture’s presence within planning strategies consequently influenced the emptying of meaning while a surfeit of representation replaced that which was lost in the process of becoming modern.

Examining the conceptual linkages between architectural and psychic interiors is demanded of the Italian colonial city. In Asmara, private domestic spaces and the fashioning of their interiority were defined through and ultimately obscured by the processes of colonialism.

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