Through works in a variety of media, research, and community-centered programming, Prospetto a Mare, a solo exhibition by Dawit L. Petros at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, examines the links between colonization, migration, and modernism related to Italy, East Africa (especially in Eritrea and Ethiopia), Libya, and North America, with particular attention to their ties to Chicago. Art Design Chicago sat down with Dawit to understand the layers of intersection happening within the exhibition research, community engagement practices, and the artist’s artistic process.
Q1: In this exhibition, you explore how colonialism and cultural memory are inscribed in the visual culture and built environment of Chicago. Can you elaborate on how you go about telling this bigger narrative?
Dawit: “It’s a complicated narrative. There are two objects in the Chicago environment that are important to the work. And they really are the departure points.
One is a column, a 2,000-year-old column in Burnham Park called the Balbo Monument. And the second is Balbo Avenue, formerly Seventh Avenue., I believe. And then, the third thing—no longer present in the city, but the former Columbus Monument, which also had an inscription to Balbo. So, it’s these three objects, these three elements in the Chicago environment that celebrate this very complicated technological event, the arrival of a squadron of Italian seaplanes to Chicago at the 1933 fair. That’s the history that I’m interested in looking at.
I come from a part of the world in which the events in Chicago are connected in ways that people don’t know. So, the exhibition really is about what are Chicagoans passing or walking by on a day-to-day basis? What are the memories that those objects that they’re passing are connected to? And how do those actually speak to geographies and cultures that are in Northeast Africa, but are also part of the diasporic African communities’ memories in Chicago? So these really are the elements and the questions of the thematics that the exhibition is examining.”
Q2: Are there any hindrances to using the medium that you use specifically in this exhibition to tell that narrative?
Dawit: “There are multiple media. There are works that are photography. There’s sculpture. There are screen prints that intersect with painting. There are objects. There is sound work.
Part of my insistence on using these multiple languages is what you ask in your question, what is the aesthetic form that is most appropriate to excavating and addressing different complex histories? I use these different media because I think about how the question of migration, mobility, history, and memory migrate across different media. The exhibition deals with questions of migration, but the exhibition also deals with the limitations of particular mediums. Photography stops a moment. There’s a way in which it contains time in a still frame, whereas the video allows us to be witness to the passage of time. The sound allows us to use a different sensorial register. We close our eyes and we can take information in through our ears. The objects require us to be in the same physical sort of space as the object and our bodies intersect in a different way. All of these different modes, the different languages of media, as you described, are an important element for me to deal with the complexity. I find it useful to push against the limitations of various media.”
Q3: Disrupting Italy’s sanitized colonial history is central to your long-term practice and works in this exhibition. By doing so, are there other histories and narratives you hope will be highlighted?
Dawit: “I’m focusing through my research and through my own personal cultural connection on how Chicago, Italy, and Northeast Africa, specifically Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia intersect. However, all of these stories converge within this settler colonial space. I’m coming to these questions and insisting there are aspects of Italy’s colonial empire that are not known, that aren’t properly addressed within the context of Italy, Italian-American consciousness, and even within the consciousness of the African diasporic communities that I’m talking about. How many other diasporic communities reside within that context of Chicago?
What I hope the exhibition and my methods can do is say, there’s a very specific set of stories that I’m talking about and attempting to address through the exhibition but hope that people are able to pull back a little bit and see wider connections to other histories and to other connections of stories and experiences that connect Chicago to other parts of the world that we’re less familiar with.
That methodology of who has come to Chicago, under what circumstances, what kinds of convergences have been made, what kinds of histories have been obliterated, what kinds of stories have been conveniently overlooked, I think that those questions precede or supersede the specificity of the Italian-East African question. I’m hoping that people get close enough to have a different understanding of the Italian-East African, Chicago connection, but also recognize that part of what I’m offering is a wider reflection.
Secondly, one of the other things that I’m also really focusing on is the emergence of fascism as a historical movement. And the work is looking at this historical moment and this historical crisis, but I’m interested in the things that are happening in our contemporary moment. The resurgence of deep anti-immigrant, anti-Euro-American communities. We’re seeing a resurgence of this kind of rhetoric and hatred. I’m hoping that people also make this kind of a connection, especially in light of our recent election and the results.”
Q4: The Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Somali communities here in Chicago have been greatly included in your exhibition planning and programming. Can you speak to the importance that you felt in making sure these communities were included?
Dawit: “It’s really important for me, and when I say me, I mean the entire team at MOCP, which comprised an extensive research and travel period. We put together an advisory committee that consisted of members of academics, scholars, artists, from various communities, including Italian-Americans but also the African communities that you just mentioned.
We then needed to rethink the relationship that certain institutions in Chicago have to these communities. Part of what has drawn me to art and to these questions is a recognition of how certain communities and their historical narratives haven’t been centered in these institutions. The work of outreach isn’t about inviting a community to an institution where it doesn’t see itself in its own history reflected. I think the work of outreach begins by going to the communities and saying, this is the work that is being done.
The Terra Foundation facilitated significant resources for me to be able to do that kind of work, — to invite the Eritrean community, the Ethiopian community to their own community organizational spaces, to their own community centers, to present the research. The community outreach, in addition to the community advisory board, meant that strategies for how this could happen were being hashed out.
When the exhibition opened, it was important for me to open the exhibition not here, but to have a walk that began at the monument. It was important to take these questions and these conversations into the built environment. I don’t know what will happen with this monument, but I think it’s important to address it while it’s there –– inviting communities to the monument so that these conversations could happen in that context.
We transformed the museum space itself a few nights ago so that it housed this traditional coffee ceremony that is part of my community. It was an opportunity for the women who presented that ritual to talk about women’s space, those contexts in which coffee, time, narrative, and stories are shared, are an important catalyst for the type of knowledge that I have about my histories.
All of this is about how an exhibition can serve as a departure point for a different form of community building. The exhibition is one element of building a different kind of monument. Building a different kind of archive, repository of information. I’m looking at a lot of archives in Chicago and around the world, but I’m also conscious of the fact that we are building an archive. All of the meetings we had were recorded. All of the community advisory board meetings were collected. This is a counter-memorial, building a different form of remembrance.
It was really important to not just say, you’re invited to the museum, come. There’s a reason that these communities, that my communities aren’t coming. Recognizing that not everybody can visit this space, so, how do you build a source book that circulates, that extends the conversation? How do I actively engage with these communities, whose histories are so integrally connected to the two institutions and the histories of this place?
I cannot do it through the existing model. With the resources that Terra has provided and the support of MOCP has enabled is, is this. We needed to do something different. This has been a deeply gratifying experience for all of these reasons. During the opening, I had people from my community who came to the dinner, who said, ‘I’ve never been to a museum.’ And that’s it. All of the things I’ve described here are significant and important, of course, but it’s that because I know what it’s like to dig through my data bank of memories, going through museums and galleries and seeing a set of experiences and stories that you feel compelled to look at [but] that you know you’re not embedded within.”
Q5: Research is central to your creative practice. In doing research for the exhibition, did you make any discoveries that really surprised you?
Dawit: “Research is fundamental to the work that I do. And I always think about my primary objective as knowledge production. The research is absolutely essential to establishing different levels of understanding, establishing different modes, different questions that resonate. It means I’m coming into an awareness of my own ignorance and my own limitations. There’s a lot that I’ve discovered. But I think that the simplest way to answer that question is to really think about how my understanding of my own histories has been fundamentally recalibrated.
This exhibition looks at the labor that has gone into building certain colonial spaces, Chicago included. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya. Part of what I’ve been aware of is the incredible sort of quantity of labor, Indigenous labor in each of these spaces that has gone into the modernization of each of these nations. And then finally, I said earlier that I’m looking at historical questions, but I’m really invested in how they’re connected to events that are happening today.
A significant amount of time and research that I was doing prior to the work that you see was looking at contemporary migration of young Africans into Europe through Italy. I did not understand how the colonial history is directly connected to policies that are unfolding now. I’m happy to go into greater detail, but the things that are happening today, the migration policies, who can travel where, under what circumstances –– a lot of the conflicts that we’re seeing on the African continent, specifically between Eritrea and Ethiopia, there are direct correlations to that colonial moment. The cartography, the way in which territories were partitioned. It’s one thing to have an abstract understanding of this thing, but it’s another thing to actually see the documentation and the material which allows you to see what was produced through those conditions and to be able to reflect on it concretely and clearly.
I’m always working in conjunction with academics and scholars who know far more about these histories than I do, and so the publication, for example, in the symposium, architectural historians, cultural historians, [and] political theorists –– all of the contributions that they make give me a much deeper understanding. It’s discovery upon discovery doing this kind of work. It’s a constant reminder of one’s own limited knowledge of histories and the task of trying to bridge that distance in some way.”
Q6: Did being in dialogue with these communities shift your thinking about your artistic or teaching practice, or your project, or ways you approached the exhibition?
Dawit: “Yes. Engaging with the different communities was impactful because when you operate in a highly academic or highly artistic world, there’s a frequently very specialized language, shorthand, that you end up using that is quite isolating. And the conversations with communities were a reminder of how complex thematics [and] questions do not need to be couched in language that isolates or distances the communities who are deeply affected by those histories. The histories and the ideas that I’m looking at are tenuous. They’re hard to fully grasp. That doesn’t mean that I can avoid or evade the responsibility of being able to address those in multiple contexts, in ways [where] there is reciprocity, understanding, that conversation can happen.
That was an important reminder and something that comes back into the classroom, that comes back into the work. Who are the audiences that I’m in conversation with at any given moment and how does the language that I’m using privilege or welcome various communities into the work and into the concerns?
Q7: What pieces are you anticipating will spark the most dialogue amongst audiences? Are there any pieces that you enjoyed creating the most?
Dawit: “I just hope any of them resonate. I cannot be so arrogant as to assume that there is one that will do that. Because most art visitors don’t commune with an artwork for a sufficient period of time for it to leave a meaningful place within their psyche. So, I’m grateful if an audience has a meaningful engagement with one piece. I don’t know what it is. I just hope that there is one. And if there are two, then I’m deeply honored.
I think the beauty and the power of art when it’s effective is that it creates an opening for this specific place from which a person looks to engage and to interact and offer this type of conversation. A lot of the pieces are photographic and I think we live in such a visual, photographic moment. From that perspective, that kind of language is accessible to a lot of people.
The piece that I feel today at this moment [that I enjoyed working on the most] are the Specter pieces, these large black mirror, large black mirror works and they are effective for me for various reasons. One is as a physical object; I think it deals with questions of the presence and absence, modes of how you register information. It is an image overlaid over top of a photograph which is actually produced by machine which is an etching in the plexiglass but it looks more like a pencil quivering drawing on top of the exactitude of the photographic image, which you really can’t see. That kind of artistic language. The vocabulary and the way the vocabulary are deployed in this piece is really meaningful for me. It’s also the material. I’ve been using black glass in my work for a long time and it’s a challenge. This work invites the viewer to engage and be conscious of their own effort. That is something that I’m hoping remains with people looking at the work. They’re physically brought into the work through the reflective properties of the glass, the space in which they’re in and the space that they’re looking at in this northeast African context; they merge. But ultimately, all of these convergences happen through their own through the presence and the act of looking by the visitor and that piece does a lot of hard work that the questions are proposing.”
Q8: What would you like audiences to take away from the exhibition?
Dawit: “ I hope there’s a little bit of information and understanding of histories that people may not be aware of. A lot of Italians are not aware of their colonial history. Let alone Italian Americans, let alone French Americans. So, that’s the first thing. If people can recognize these histories of colonialism and empire that [they’re] not aware of as we live and work in a separate colonial context.
Chicago as a city is a mosaic of the world. The world is contained in Chicago and so one does not have to leave this local context in order to understand how events in Chicago have a direct bearing both historically and within the contemporary moment to events that are happening elsewhere. What does an awareness of and recognition of that kind of connectivity look like?
And thirdly, there are many memorials, and I don’t necessarily mean monuments, but there are many memorials all over this city that ask us to remember certain versions of history, to prioritize particular voices in very fixed ways. I hope that people begin to dig into the conditions that have prioritized either certain forms of remembrance or particular stories.
And then I hope that people just take away from them, the beauty of the objects. The craft of what is here is deeply important. All of these questions of history and memory that we’re talking about are deeply significant but I’m also dealing with the craft of my labor as an artist. I hope that people find the work beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and worth some time.”
Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a Mare is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography now through December 20, 2025.
