Dawit L. Petros

Spazio Disponibile – available space – considers the Italian colonial project and its lingering links with migration and modernism.

In Dawit Petros’ show, Spazio Disponible, at Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery until April 3, I make a beeline to the moving image enclave. All at One Point (Casa, Study I) introduces viewers to an Italian community centre in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal). The dual-channel video installation moves through different elements of Casa d'Italia, from architectural drawings to slow pans of the floors and windows, interior and exterior. 

Fascist symbols embedded in design elements are revealed as the video loops. Petros engages the cultural centre as a historic site from a transnational and diasporic perspective. This is carried by the reflections of Geometra Petros, an expert on Italian colonial architecture. His recollections enabled a viewing attentiveness that I found more effective than the editing, installation or narrative choices. In other iterations of the show, the video has been projected onto adjoining walls as opposed to the single wall here.

We hear Petros – the narrator – reflect on the links between a Montreal institution and the remains of Italian occupation in Asmara, Eritrea, where Petros – the artist – was born. We’re left curious about understanding the layers of colonial-era recollections and the imprints of its aftermath. 

The exhibition cinema is tiled with moody black and white photographs from Italian-built theatres in Asmara. This series, Hillawe Etti Qetsali Tsilalot (Persistent presence of shadows), world-builds the afterlife of an era, not dead but existing as a site of memory, a palimpsest. 

In the exhibition’s transnational leaps, from photographs of maritime points of immigration, to Petros’ signature photos within photos resituating subjectivities, I’m curious about the absence of locating the Italian cultural centre – Casa d’Italia, built in 1936 – in Tiohtiá:ke. A show that engages post-colonial considerations isn’t bound to a specific approach to place, but this absence felt removed from contemporary decolonial considerations in so-called Canada. 

La questione Affricana / La questione Italianna, as a pair of textual questions reappropriated into twinned monoliths, could be understood as cenotaphs. After Petros reveals the context in which the questions were posed, the serigraphs feel like monuments. The scale and materiality of the two pieces are both an entry into the show and placeholders for public questions of the contexts that enable colonial scales of human loss. 

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Dawit L. Petros​, “La questione Affricana / La questione Italianna​,” 2020​

Dawit L. Petros​, “La questione Affricana / La questione Italianna​,” 2020​

serigraph, Coventry Rag, Plexiglas, pine, walnut, plinth 16” x 16” x 48”, frame 45” x 63” x 1.25”, installation view in “Dawit L. Petros: Spazio Disponibile,” organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (photo by Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery)

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Dawit L. Petros, “Preoccupations (Rivista Coloniale, 1906-1943),” 2020​

Dawit L. Petros, “Preoccupations (Rivista Coloniale, 1906-1943),” 2020​

serigraph, Arnheim paper, 38 prints, each 30” x 22”, detail of installation at “Dawit L. Petros: Spazio Disponibile” organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (photo by Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery)

In Spazio Disponibile, Italian for “available space,” there are other works, including Preoccupations (Rivista Coloniale, 1906-1943), a series of serigraphs repurposing a colonial print project into extractions, abstractions and bright geometrical works installed across the exhibition from one another. This series manages to make room for the richness of decay, a strange impression while surrounded by vibrancy. 

I’ve followed Petros’ work for over a decade. I feel like I was asked to write about the show because of a flattening of Ethiopian and Eritrean diasporas. I feel a faint imprint of this question without knowing where it’s coming from or how to unpack it for whom: redacted. ■

Dawit L. Petros: Spazio Disponibile at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina from Dec. 9, 2021, to April 3, 2022. 

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MacKenzie Art Gallery

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