The art of smearing. How is feminist decolonizing artivism received by Italian newspapers? The case of Indro Montanelli’s Statue

On the 8th of March 2019, during a demonstration organised in occasion of the International Women’s Day in Milan, a few members of the feminist collective Non Una Di Meno Milano threw washable pink paint on the statue that commemorates the Italian journalist Indro Montanelli (1909-2001). The aim of exposing at a visual level the acclaimed writer’s controversial past was crucial to the group’s symbolic action. In fact, despite being a reference figure for many Italian intellectuals, Montanelli participated in the Abyssinian war in 1935 and, as member of the Fascist army, he engaged in a relationship with a 12 years old local girl who acted as his wife and sexual object. The journalist, who later produced critical statements on Fascism and his own commitment to the colonial enterprise, never publicly regretted his participation in the practice of submitting Ethiopian and Eritrean girls to concubinage, commonly referred to as “madamato” (Trento 2011). The collective’s action, which can be labelled as a feminist decolonizing practice, has already been read as a form of artivism that manipulated Italian’s artistic heritage with the objective of sparking “the debate in the general public around the canonized narrative of Italy’s colonial past” (Lissi 2020). In this sense, an analysis of the resonance that journalistic coverage assigned to the event proves crucial for understanding the impact that such an action have had on Italian public opinion and on the progress towards the Country’s mental decolonization. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative analysis conducted on a corpus of articles published in the aftermath of the artivist performance on Montanelli’s statue on 15 Italian online newspapers. The study, which is carried out with the support of the qualitative data analysis software NVivo, avails of the methodology of Foucauldian critical discourse analysis in order to identify the rhetorical strategies employed by journalists to criticise or to legitimate the feminist collective’s action. Among these rhetorical strategies, particular attention is paid to those discursive techniques adopted to portray the act as a form of vandalism or, on the contrary, as a form of art. The aim is to show how the discourse on art VS non-art/vandalism is used to confirm (or overcome) the “discursive limits” (Jäger and Maier 2009: 47) imposed by the still dominant narratives on the Nation’s colonial history as well as on the disposability of “othered” women’s bodies