Martina Caruso

Martina Caruso (born in 1978 in Brussels) is an art historian and writer, former Assistant Director for Art, Architecture and the Creative Industries at the British School at Rome. She has lectured in Art History and the History and Theory of Photography at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Camberwell College of Arts and London College of Communication. Martina has curated exhibitions in Rome, London and New York. Her research interests focus on lens-based media, fascism, antifascism, gender and decolonialism. She co-directed the Giulio Turcato archives in Rome and worked on the artist’s catalogue raisonné. As well as publishing articles, catalogue essays and book reviews on photography and Italian modern art, her book Italian Humanist Photography from Fascism to the Cold War was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Currently Martina is working on colonial and postcolonial representations of landscape in the Mediterranean as well as a project on private memoirs and public memory under Fascism. She is interested in approaching history through a combination of the subjective and the objective, the creative and the factual, with a strong visual culture perspective.

During her residency Martina proposes to begin writing an experimental book that investigates the gaps that exist between family memoirs, photographs and letters in relation to scholarship and archival resources. The research focuses on the fascist crimes her paternal grandfather, Pietro Caruso, committed of which he was accused, and for he was executed on 22 September 1944. By splicing her grandmother Zita Stefani’s memoirs with her own primary and secondary source findings, Martina’s book will place divergent historical accounts from the personal and public spheres, questioning their co-existence in order to reveal aspects of the history that may have been stifled due to the way in which Fascism has been historicized in Italy.