Universal Embassy

Universal Embassy presents photographs of three buildings which in 2006 were hosting or have hosted Somali embassies, along with a reconstruction of their history.

The buildings are located in two countries which marked Somalia’s colonial past, and in Belgium, where a long occupation of the building by undocumented migrants led to demands for the rights of citizenship.

About Universal Embassy

One day I entered the Somali consulate in Rome, to help renew a passport. In the garden there were people, probably Somalis, who seemed to have set up camp there, and the ground floor there were a group of women who were washing clothes. The consulate looked like an apartment building and the consul himself seemed to live there. This experience left a mark on me, so a few years later I decided to work on a photo series on Somalia’s embassies, discovering that each had its own history, conditioned by the behavior of officials, local factors, and even pure chance.

Embassy buildings could be pure architectural shells reported to be in the condition of real estate, as in London, or islands of a resilient but seemingly irretrievably compromised national identity (as in Rome), or even as sites of redefinition of rights, as in the case of the embassy in Brussels (the Universal Embassy that gave the entire series its title). What I had in front of me challenged the face value of these buildings, and it seemed to me that the reconstruction of the history of these properties could make this revelation clearer.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

In 2006, the year Berti created Universal Embassy, three former Somali embassies – those in Rome, Paris and Brussels – were no longer in use and partially occupied by Somali refugees. The headquarters in Rome and Brussels in particular became free ports, a place of domicile for Somali sans-papiers, engaged in asserting their rights as political refugees in Europe. Up until a few months ago, the building in via dei Villini in Rome had fallen into a growing spiral of violence and desperation over the last several years, inhabited by almost one hundred and fifty refugees in conditions of absolute insecurity, lacking any form of material subsistence and health care.

Berti’s work faced this huge entanglement of geopolitical problems – the dissolution of Somalia, the problematic spread of refugees in Europe and the abandonment of the national diplomatic headquarters – through a rigorous photographic exercise that does not indulge in the spectacle and the documentary account, but it limits itself to being an objective representation of the three facades of the buildings in question, which show little of their state of neglect.

The nineteenth-twentieth century democratic idea of nationstate, represented by the apparent clarity of the Somali legations, hosted in buildings purchased by the old European aristocracy, is an illusion that is completely shattered by the true story of the Somali experience and by the contingencies of what happened in these three headquarters during these years. Focusing on the diplomatic terminals of a geopolitical decline that took place on a global scale, Universal Embassy thus puts together a reflection on the legacy of the European colonial culture in the affairs of contemporary African countries, more than fifty years after the official end of colonialism.

© Luigi Fassi

excerpt from from «The Vertigo of Reality », in Cristiano Berti. Vertigine del Reale/Vertigo of Reality, exhibition catalogue, Turin: Allemandi (ISBN 978-88-422-2104-3), 2012, pp. 153 – 154

Cristiano Berti addresses the recent history of the XX century from a Nietzschian position; that is, with the idea that it is legitimate to serve history “only insofar as it serves living”. Berti knows well that history has become irreparably weak. It is no longer the magistra vitae consigned to us by tradition – reality has demonstrated the fallacy of a historical ethic – and it is much less the educational instrument, inherited from the XIX century, at the service of power. To history, and to its gaze, nothing remains beyond a withdrawal within its specific functions as custodian of memory, of different and changing collective identities.

Cristiano Berti has dedicated himself to this idea for some time now, preferring the memory of communities in the shadows, of that part of society destined to pass its existence in silence, in underground terrain. Thus the artist brings with him, through the creative act, the classical Greek meaning of the term history (ìstoria), which signifies investigation, inquiry, curiosity. It is precisely upon these presuppositions that he constructs his work.

© Gabriele Tinti

excerpt from «Universal Embassy», in Universal Embassy, exhibition leaflet, Rome: AOCF 58, 2006