Boggiano Heirs an interrogation on Italy’s pro-slavery past
admin 
Boggiano Heirs is the new book from Cristiano Berti, a visual artist from Turin, Italy, that focuses on a wealthy merchant, Antoni Boggiano, who became a successful businessman in Cuba in the 1800s and commissioned a beautiful white marble altar that stands in Trinidad’s most important church today.
The book is a unique exploration of Boggiano’s legacy on the descendants of his slaves - and more broadly, an interrogation of Italy’s pro-slavery past.
Using an array of sources, Berti weaves together the stories of Boggiano and the people he owned as slaves.
The book uses the mystery of the Boggianos to understand wider developments within the Caribbean, uncovering a hushed history of entrepreneurship, travel, exploitation, enslavement, aspiration, and intermixing of cultures and ethnicities.
- Boggiano Heirs is a unique exploration of one merchant’s legacy on the descendants of his slaves - and more broadly, an interrogation of Italy’s pro-slavery past
- The book is part of the second of Futile Cycles, a series of hybrid works in which the author discovers affinities and distances between historical and artistic research
- The project is supported by the Italian Council programme to promote Italian contemporary art in the world
Boggiano Heirs is distributed in the US by IDEA Books and produced thanks to the support of the Italian Council’s programme for the international promotion of Italian art, under the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.
At the centre of Berti's investigation is the figure of Antonio Boggiano, a wealthy Italian merchant who lived in Cuba in the first half of the 19th century, and the people he owned, either as house slaves or on his coffee plantation.
Using an array of sources, Berti weaves together the stories of Boggiano and the people he owned as slaves. Uniting everything is the surname Boggiano, imposed on the slaves and still widespread in the Afro-Cuban community.
The book uses the mystery of the Boggianos to understand wider developments within the Caribbean, uncovering a hushed history of entrepreneurship, travel, exploitation, enslavement, aspiration, and intermixing of cultures and ethnicities.
Boggiano Heirs closes with a conversation with American art critic and author Seph Rodney, on art and the representation and memory of slavery:
“The question that lies at the heart of this book and of the whole art project is what to do with the heritage that one has been given, whether we are discussing the Boggiano clan, you the writer and inheritor of a certain history or historical mystery and an Italian culture that frames this mystery, and me, someone who has inherited an ambiguous and conflicted Caribbean legacy. (...)”
The book is part of a larger project entitled Futile Cycles: Boggiano, which include two other works developed by Berti: a wall installation depicting two large family trees, in which the people born in Africa stand at the apex, branching out through marriages that took place in the first half of the 19th century, and a video in which some stories collected by the author in the area where Antonio Boggiano's coffee plantation once stood intersect with the conversation a family of Afro- Cuban Boggianos. The installation will be presented to the public at the end of 2023.
Cristiano Berti (Turin, 1967) began to work as a painter and sculptor in 1987, shortly after obtaining his diploma at the Primo Liceo Artistico and enrolling with the Faculty of Architecture at Turin University, where he graduated several years later. His first exhibition, in 1993, was a personal exhibition at the Premio Salvi in Sassoferrato (Italy). Alongside his artistic activity, he studied history of technology, publishing various specialist papers. From the mid-1990s he worked on a mobile unit for health risk reduction among migrant sex workers, an experience which, years later, was to form the basis of various visual art works. At the end of the 1990s he stopped working as an outreach worker, though continuing to be active in the sphere of social inclusion and gender empowerment. He also moved away from traditional artistic techniques, trying out new technologies and in particular working with laminated plastic. Shortly afterwards he definitively abandoned painting and developed his interest in photography, video and the installation of re-contextualised objects. In comparison with the past, he also placed greater emphasis upon collaborative work, interactions and artistic acts. In these last works he often uses different kinds of language and media in order to construct systems of signs and meanings in which formal appearance becomes more complex, contradictory, or ambiguous. He teaches multimedia communication at the Academy of Arts in Macerata. He is married and has two sons.
Article By Leticia Callista & Alton Anderson
