Richard Mosse

Philip Guston Rome Prize
September 2, 2024–July 3, 2025
Profession
Artist, New York
Project title
Late Fascism and Fantasy Fiction in Contemporary Italy
Project description

My project will examine the Italian far right’s embrace of fantasy fiction, embodied in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s reverence for English author J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, her participation in Camp Hobbit in the 1990s, and Rome’s Atreju right-wing youth conference, set up by Meloni in 1998 and named after the hero of The NeverEnding Story, a fantasy film from 1984. I intend to interview citizens, politicians, political groups, political scientists, librarians, writers, critics, academics, artists, strangers, and more to produce a new body of work that looks carefully at the position of the Italian public—who elected Meloni—in relation to evolving late-fascist ideas, as well as decoding the ways in which the fantasy genre speaks tacitly to nativist, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, racist, and Eurocentric thinking, creating a safe space for extreme right-wing ideas, symbols, and community.