Funded by Historic Environment Scotland, the exhibition ‘Incontri: A Scots Italian Photographic Archive’ held recently at the Italian Institute of Culture Edinburgh, highlighted the ‘encounter’ between Italy and Scotland through images retrieved from a variety of institutional and family archives. Part of an ongoing research project hosted by the Italian Department at St Andrews University, ‘Incontri’ aimed to capture a dynamic sense of the entanglements of people and culture over time. It was the end point of a series of workshops and pop-up exhibitions held across Scotland exploring the cultural transformations prompted by Italian migration to Scotland and by Scotland’s own reception of Italian culture. In quite a literal sense, it looked at how Scotland’s landscape has been changed and is still being shaped by Italian Scottish cultural cohabitation.
The exhibition’s twenty-five bilingual panels displayed interconnections between things and people. Italian-run fish and chip shops and cafés were collective social spaces for the wider community. The terrazzo work of men mostly from the Veneto region of Italy decorates many of Scotland’s public buildings including the Glasgow’s Arlington Baths where the writer Alexander Trocchi was a member. The Scottish landscape carries the memory of the Arandora Star disaster with the Italian Cloister Garden at Glasgow’s St Andrews Cathedral and gravestones scattered across the Western Islands. Scottish traditional fiddle music is indebted to the pioneering work of Ron Gonnella. The construction teams that built the Forth Railway Bridge included squads of Italian labourers. The San Ciro Pizzeria in Leith currently houses a shrine to Napoli’s Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour. Recently arrived Italians, or ‘expats’ use objects to represent feelings of connection as well as loss. The experience of women, one of the strands that cut across the photographic montage, gave insights into usually silenced differences of gender, sexuality and class.
Some of the exhibition panels were designed by contributors to the project rather than members of the research team. A glimpse into an unwieldy archive, the exhibition invited the photographs to speak and ask questions about the often sedimented ways of seeing and thinking about migratory cultures. Self-consciously partial and open-ended, ‘Incontri’ showed histories, ways of belonging, cohabitation and adaptation in intimate and public settings and in material and emotional relationships.
The exhibition panels and other material from the project can be seen on the website here
Funded by Historic Environment Scotland, ‘Incontri: A Scots Italian Photographic Archive’ is research project headed by Derek Duncan, Professor of Italian Cultural Studies at the University of St Andrews. Eleanor Summers was lead Research Assistant on the project and also designed and co-curated the exhibition.
