Horror

• He is on a secret mission to meet representatives of Britain’s ruling Labour party – including, he hopes, the recently elected prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.
• The 38-year-old Matteotti, a tireless defender of workers’ rights, still hopes Mussolini can be stopped.
• For Matteotti, this new British government – the first to be led by Labour, although not as a majority – is a beacon of hope.

Four days in London

• Britain’s new prime minister was a working-class Scot who had made his way up via humble jobs and political activism.
• In contrast, Matteotti hailed from a wealthy family that owned 385 acres in the Polesine region of north-eastern Italy.

• The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
• But something else may have troubled Mussolini about Matteotti’s visit to London – part of a European tour that also included stops in Brussels and Paris.

Death of a socialist

• He had reportedly been working on this speech day and night, studying data and checking numbers for many hours.
• This secret group, known as Ceka after the Soviet political police created to repress dissent, had been following Matteotti for weeks.
• The squad’s leader, US-born Amerigo Dumini, reputedly boasted of having previously killed several socialist activists.
• Socialist MPs, alerted by Matteotti’s wife, denounced the MP’s disappearance – but were not altogether surprised by it.
• For a few days, it appeared that the resulting public outrage – much of it aimed at Mussolini himself – might even bring down Italy’s government, spelling the death knell for fascism.

Why was Matteotti murdered?

• His death can be seen as one of the most consequential political assassinations of the 20th century.
• Yet for the Italian right, Matteotti is a ghost.
• Throughout her political career, Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has hardly ever spoken about the historical crimes of fascists in Italy, and not once about the murder of Matteotti.
• The historical debate about the murder has also never reached a unanimous conclusion about who gave the order to kill Matteotti and why.

The LSE documents

• The story of how the documents came to be secreted away in the LSE library takes us back to London for another clandestine visit – this time by Gaetano Salvemini, an esteemed professor of modern history who fled Italy in November 1925.
• In December 1926, while still in London, Salvemini received the secret package which he soon passed on to the LSE.
• But they were driven by the conviction that these documents could one day prove beyond doubt that Mussolini had orchestrated Matteotti’s assassination.
• Salvemini may thus have considered the LSE a safe haven – and there the documents have remained ever since.

A voice from the dead

• Rather, the move allowed Mussolini to legislate unchallenged while the seats of the 123 MPs who had joined the rebellion were left vacant.
• Matteotti’s article, entitled “Machiavelli, Mussolini and Fascism”, was a response to an article published in the magazine’s June issue by Mussolini himself.
• The Italian prime minister’s translated essay about the Renaissance intellectual Niccolò Machiavelli had carried the provocative headline “The Folly of Democracy”.
• The article was widely commented on in the British press, which had been following the story of Matteotti’s murder almost daily.
• His funeral was rushed through very quickly, with the coffin being transported overnight in an attempt to prevent public gatherings.

The end of Italian democracy

• In a speech to parliament on January 3 1925, he took “political responsibility” for the murder while not admitting to ordering it.
• Mussolini’s speech ended with a rhetorical invitation to indict him – to a parliament now populated only by fascists.
• The speech signalled the end of Italian democracy.
• The nature of Mussolini’s involvement was little discussed in the wake of his execution in April 1945 and the end of the second world war.
• Was it the evidence of the Mussolini government’s corruption that he planned to reveal to the Italian parliament the day after his kidnap?

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• He has also received funding from the Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti to study the LSE documents.
• Gianluca Fantoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Nekojarashi, Inc. and Intertrust today announced they will debut Chime, a film by celebrated director, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, through a unique Web3 collaboration on Nekojarashi’s Digital Video Trading (DVT) Platform, Roadstead.io .
• Superticket purchasers will have exclusive rights to Chime, which will be available worldwide on April 12, 2024, Japan Standard Time.
• In an unprecedented move for a Kurosawa film, Chime introduces a unique viewing experience through limited-edition Supertickets, available only for a month post-opening.
• It is a crazy movie, a bizarre movie, and that is what this film is about,” said Kurosawa Kiyoshi.

• Director Kyle Edward Ball’s feature film debut, Skinamarink, achieved unexpected commercial success last year after going viral on TikTok.
• Hailed by some critics as the best horror film of 2023, or even the scariest of all time, Skinamarink is a work of experimental slow cinema.

Bite-sized nightmares

• Ball’s distinctive aesthetic was developed via his YouTube channel Bitesized Nightmares.
• Here, he shared experimental videos based on his nightmares.
• He then invited viewers to share their own “nightmares” in the comments so he could depict them in subsequent videos.
• Directors Michael and Danny Philipou have more than 1 billion views and nearly 7 million subscribers on their channel, RackaRacka.

From the ‘weird part’ of YouTube to TikTok

• TikTok is now also emerging as an important site for this aesthetically rich “uncanny and weird” creative content.
• It’s not surprising Skinamarink went viral on TikTok when you consider the app’s category of “analog horror” had 2.3 billion views as of when this article was written.
• Analog horror videos may be depictions of creepy inhuman (but human-like) creatures, such as in this TikTok video.
• But while analog horror is being driven in new directions on TikTok, it has long been a mainstay of YouTube.

The future of experimental art-horror

• Director Jane Schoenbrun’s films also harness the themes and aesthetics of analog horror.
• Like Skinamarink, their debut feature, We’re All Going To the World’s Fair (2021), is an unapologetically creepy work of experimental slow cinema.
• The careers of Ball, Parsons, Schoenbrun and the Philipous showcase how experimental horror trends on TikTok and YouTube have successfully crossed into the mainstream.

Jessica Balanzategui receives funding from the Australian Children's Television Foundation, the City of Melbourne, and Creative Australia. Jessica is currently working with the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art to run public programs associated with their major exhibition, From the other side.

• Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.
• At the same time, it’s an opportunity for Western Australia’s art followers to see a range of works not previously assembled in Perth.

A translucent shower

The exhibition is installed across two levels, conjoined through an architectural void that invites spectacle. In this void, Scarce’s glistening Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17) hangs from the ceiling by hundreds of wires.
Scarce’s works are so steeped in the contemporary art idiom that, despite the centrality of glass throughout this exhibition, we might not at first consider her a “glass artist”. Yet in Thunder Raining Poison, and in her two other “cloud” works, Cloud Chamber (2020) and Death Zephyr (2016), the artist draws our attention to the fragility and beauty of the material.

• This potato-like tuberous root vegetable, which urban-dwelling Australians may not be familiar with, grows throughout the bush.
• The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, and perhaps the low lighting, seem to demand quiet in the space.
• Born in Woomera, Scarce is descended from the Lake Eyre Kokatha people and the Southern Flinders Ranges Nukunu people.

Nuclear colonialism

Australian nuclear colonialism is a recurrent theme in the exhibition, with the upstairs gallery including three of Scarce’s Glass Bomb works from the Blue Danube series (2015).
Perhaps the most poignant work with this theme is Fallout Babies (2016). Set in a corner space, this work is partially surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a graveyard with the buried bodies of children from communities that were exposed to the fallout from the bomb testing. The bodies are metaphorically represented by bulbous glass plums, which speak of fertility and promise.
Hollowing Earth (2016-17) is made of materials quite literally infused with trace amounts of uranium. It glows a luminous green under the black-lit gallery. The glass vessels in Hollowing Earth represent bush bananas, another recurrent bush food in Scarce’s aesthetic cypher. The glass surfaces of many of these voluminous glowing bodies are torn while the glass is still hot and malleable.

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Bush bananas also appear in the work In The Dead House (2020), a work previously installed in the old mortuary in Adelaide Botanic Gardens as part the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Laid out on a vintage mortuary trolley, fragile glass bodies are ripped wide open.
The work references early 20th century Adelaide coroner, Ramsay Smith, who profited from exporting Aboriginal remains to British museums. Smith is notorious for having decapitated the corpses – and the bush bananas echo heads and bodies that have been violently disgorged.

Moments of gentle beauty

• Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day includes some moments of gentle beauty found in the love of family and tragic ancestry.
• Both Remember Royalty (2018) and Dinah (2016) belong to stories of trauma, institutionalised racism and inhumane colonial abuse.
• But these are also moments in this exhibition that actively seek to restore pride that was once brutally taken.
• Read more:
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• Art of Peace receives a Linkage Project grant (LP210300068) from the Australian Research Council over three years (2023-2026).
• He is not involved in any way with the curation or exhibition of Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day at AGWA.