Simon Njami on masks, memory, and the unfinished work of decolonial imagination at Musea e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
17 April 2026
In this wide-ranging conversation, curator Simon Njami discusses NAFRICA–MASCHERE, an exhibition that stages a charged encounter between colonial archives and contemporary artistic practices. Bringing together historical material such as the unsettling anthropological records of Lidio Cipriani and works by artists across continents, Njami resists closure in favour of a dynamic, open-ended inquiry. For him, the exhibition is less about resolving historical tensions than about reactivating them in the present, exposing the persistence of colonial logics, interrogating how identities are constructed and perceived, and creating space for individual positions to emerge. Through the metaphor of the mask, Njami invites viewers to reflect on the unstable boundaries between concealment and projection, and to confront the enduring complexities of representation, power, and selfhood.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Your exhibition brings into confrontation archival material from Italian colonial anthropology and contemporary artistic responses. How did you negotiate the tension between exposing historical violence and allowing space for artistic re-subjectivisation?
Simon Njami: Historical violence is everywhere we look. Most of the time, hidden or rewritten. Its cynicism has been denounced over the years against those who were trying (and are still trying) to deny it. I selected Italian archives because the exhibition was taking place in this country, but one could find the same kind of material all over the Western world. I precisely wanted to show the colonial violence, not through what it was, but by exposing it to our contemporary world. I did not want to turn the show into a closed discussion between colonisers and colonised, but, on the contrary, to show the iniquity as something that concerns us all. Therefore, the exhibition included Africans, Americans, and Italians to go beyond geography and address a level that could tell a story not of the past but of the present in everyday life. I did not want to establish a global statement, but to collect individual positions
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
NAFRICA–MASCHERE revisits the figure of the mask not as an ethnographic object but as a shifting metaphor. How do you see the mask operating today between concealment, projection, and survival?
The mask is always multifaceted. The one who wears it doesn’t perceive it the same way the one who sees it does. It may, for the one who is using it, serve as a shield, a protection, or a disguise. It works as a distancing between what is meant and what is perceived. It provides the wearer with a safe space for observation and negotiation. For the seer, it is always an easy way to jump to a conclusion. This metaphorical mask is concrete and real in many places in the world. If you’re white, black, yellow or red, you carry for the other who doesn’t know, a great deal of preconceptions that might turn into some constructed realities. This contradiction between the perceived and the real is one of the main issues our world faces. How can we go beyond the mask? How can we reach the very self of a person who is confronted with?
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
The exhibition foregrounds Lidio Cipriani’s work as a central, unsettling archive. What responsibilities arise when reactivating such material within a contemporary curatorial framework?
As I just said, this reactivation implies, functions as a reminder. One might think that all this is behind us. Cipriani was a fascist, an admirer of Hitler. Someone who believed that some humans are superior to others. When we look around us today, are we so far from these days? I believe in history not as a dead and rotten matter, but as a lively proposition that needs to be reactivated every now and then, especially in times of tensions, nationalisms and exclusive community claims. The responsibilities are ours, as individuals, as people and as thinking animals.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
You describe the exhibition as a dialogue between two opposing registers, the reduction of the human face to a colonial object and the reassertion of subjectivity through art. Where do you locate the possibility of rupture within this dialogue?
When I called it a dialogue, I meant an impossible dialogue. By showing the faces of a given subjective reality, I have invited the audience to take a side. I am convinced that none of the people who entered the exhibition had the means to hold this global vision that brought together two opposing visions of humanity. And I wanted the Italian audience to draw parallels between their past and the present times. Socrates defined three possible interactions between two individuals: those he agrees with entirely, those he disagrees with entirely, and those with whom he can have a constructive dialogue. Cipriani and those of his kind belong to the second.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
In positioning Naples as both a historical site of colonial projection and a contemporary site of reflection, how does the geography of the exhibition reshape the narratives it seeks to interrogate?
Napoli is probably the most African city in Italy. It’s a story of trades and relationships that goes a long way back. I wanted to remind Italians, and further, European, about the common history they share with Africa, despite what is, on a day-to-day basis, said and done. In Italy, the people from the South, often referred to pejoratively as terroni, are suffering from a relative racism from their fellow citizens from the North. Masks, as I said before, don’t only concern skin, but the way people are looked at that contradicts, most of the time, their perception of themselves.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
The project unfolds as what you have called a “collective story still in the making” . How do you approach curating an exhibition that resists closure and instead insists on incompleteness?
An ancient Latin playwright once wrote: What is human cannot be stranger to me. I have always worked on what we can share rather than on differences. What is missing on the one hand can be retrieved on the other. It is of the utmost importance, given the times we are facing, to remind each and every one of this fundamental truth.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
By bringing together African and European artists, the exhibition proposes a transcontinental conversation. How do these artistic positions complicate or disrupt inherited binaries of centre and periphery?
I have never believed in Centers or peripheries, which are ideological constructions. The reality is that we are always at the centre of the place we inhabit, and the rest could be perceived as peripheral. By challenging these preconceived notions, I intend to invite everyone to reflect as individuals rather than as representatives of an unclear mass. When people claim to be Italian or South African, we know that doesn’t mean much beyond the passports they are waving. Identity is not, the way I conceive it, determined by a passport but by an experience that is influenced every day by knowledge and discovery of whom we too often call the Other.
Image courtesy of Michele Stanzione.
Rather than offering a singular moral reading, the exhibition opens a space of critical resonance. What kind of viewer engagement do you hope emerges from this refusal of resolution?
I want the audience to reflect on the ideas raised and, after visiting the show, challenge their own perceptions. I never tried to give lessons through my shows, because nobody is entrusted with that power. If my exhibition had a pretension, that would be to open minds to new approaches. As Hegel once put it: what is known is unknown.
This exhibition is on view at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, until 6 June 2026.
