“Uncanny things from my father’s hand”. Colonial War in Visual Cultures and Family Memories
Through circulation and appropriation, photographs that belonged to colonial actors contributed to the construction of colonial realities. This project aims at examining the private photo practices of these colonial actors. It not only analyzes how photos were produced, circulated, appropriated and passed on, but also which roles they were attributed in in the context of family memories. The colonial project of Italy against Abyssinia (1935-1941) serves as a case study. Focusing on processes of memory production by the example of German-speaking soldiers in Italy, the ambivalences of colonial wars are made visible, as there are no homogenous entities on either side. This project is situated within the field of Visual Culture Studies and applies a combined methodological approach, which means that it borrows methods from the fields of History and Cultural History, as well as from Art History, Anthropology and Sociology (e.g., research into Rezeptionsästhetik).
Between 2009–2014, Markus Wurzer studied History and German Philology at the Universities of Graz and Bologna. In his M.A. thesis, he investigated colonial narratives of otherness, violence and self in the personal testimony of a German-speaking soldier in the Italian-Abyssinian War (1935-41). Since 2015, Wurzer has been pursuing his Ph.D. at the Department of History in Graz, with a dissertation about Colonial Wars in visual cultures and family memories. Between 2015-2016, he served as a research assistant at the Department of History in Graz, and from 2016-2017 as a university assistant at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History in Linz. During that time, he spent several months at the Historical Institute in Rome as an ÖAW-fellow. His research interests include visual culture studies, (post-)colonial studies, memory studies, every-day history (Alltagsgeschichte), Italian colonial history, WWI, and NS-students in Austria during the 1930s.
