Collective memory plays an essential role in the construction of social identity. The practices used to assemble, preserve and transmit memory have fundamental consequences for the narrative used by social groups to define themselves and affirm their values. Memorialising the past is at the core of the function of the museum, an institution historically exclusive, elitist and enclosed in itself. Such a model of the museum has been challenged in recent years in favour of a new space that would offer opportunities for experimentation and research, for sharing stories and creating connections, and ultimately for questioning the very idea of collective identity. In this context, Celeste Ianniciello's research proves both relevant and sagacious for inserting the discussion of memorialising practices within the current global economic system and the migration crisis.

Migrations, Arts and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean focuses on the transcultural memory of the Mediterranean region linked to experiences of migration, exile, diaspora and transnationality. By analysing specific case studies, the author shows how innovative artistic and curatorial projects have adopted new practices of memorialising and archiving the past to highlight connections to the current postcolonial world. In this process, the antithetical relationship of concepts such as difference and identity, geographical location and dislocation, border and cultural displacement, become oxymoronic, opening new interpretative perspectives and challenging the nation-state ideology. The approach to the subject matter is interdisciplinary, drawing from sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. Prominence is given to theoretical and aesthetic contributions by female artists and feminist productions. The book is organised into three chapters, each subsequently divided into four sub-chapters.

In ‘Frames: Spaces and Borders, Transits and Positionings’, the author provides the theoretical framework of the book. While the exhaustive descriptions of theories on the topic are useful to contextualise it, it is hard, at times, to follow the narrative. Ianniciello describes how geography has been used by occidental nationalistic and patriarchal ideology, as a tool to design borders for ‘fortification’ against external threats, aimed at keeping the ‘marginal other’ at a distance as well as domesticating and dominating the external space. As a result, the migrants’ mobility becomes functional to the economic needs of nation-states. If inserted into a new narrative, however, the border can convert into a space of interaction and transformation. This is apparent in the artistic productions presented in this volume, all narrating autobiographical or fictional experiences of border crossing. The artists examined are all female and their works, originating within feminist critical thought, are a reflection on the experience of migration, on identity and subjectivity. The historically minoritarian subjectivity of women constitutes the example par excellence of disembodied identity, defined in universal and abstract terms. For this reason, it also constitutes the privileged space from which to challenge the normative categories of the universal subject (white, male, wealthy and Western) developed by the colonialist ideology, and oppose to them a fluid, fragmented and hybrid subjectivity.

The second chapter, ‘Narrations: Transcultural Memories and Migrations’, describes the decline of the traditional function of the museum. By owning, conserving and displaying the nation's mostly symbolic goods, either produced or conquered, the museum has traditionally been used as a mechanism for building and supporting the colonialist politics of Western societies. The new global economic system and the process of deterritorialisation it has produced have forced a transformation of the function and essence of the museum. Furthermore, the emergence of a new type of art, conceptualised as a relational experience offering interactive opportunities, rejects the enclosed walls of the museum to find its ideal location in the public arena. The ‘museum-nation’ has been gradually transformed into the postcolonial ‘museum-world’ where colonialism appears as an open-ended process responsible for the structure of the present world. The author offers here specific case studies that I found both interesting and useful in providing a concrete understanding of the argument previously described in a tendentially abstract language. For instance, Ianniciello illustrates how new paradigms of narratives and memorialisation were adopted by the temporary exhibition With the Objects of the Migrants (2013) in the Museum of Migration in Lampedusa. The exhibition showed remains of mundane objects found in shipwrecked boats, and letters or diaries written in different languages. In the last section of this chapter, she focuses on the concept of ‘videocartographies’ developed by Swiss scholar and artist Ursula Biemann, a post-humanist concept of counter-geography revealing the political value of the relationship between art and nature. The conclusion of this chapter is devoted to the Matri-archive of the Mediterranean: Graphics and Matter (MAM) created by a group of researchers, including the author herself, from the University of Naples ‘L'Orientale’. The project consists of a web platform whose function is to archive and disseminate the female artistic productions of the Mediterranean area, adopting a culturalist and postcolonial perspective.

The third and last chapter of the book is titled ‘Installations: Heritage, Belonging and Out of Place Legacies’ and it opens with a description of Laura Ballardi's collage art Oum el Dounia (‘Mother of the Earth’) inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. By implementing a process of fragmentation and correlation, Ballardi connects the viewer with the generative chaos of the world, using the destabilising power of Carroll's paradoxes outside geographical and historical borders. Through an orientalist dislocation of Alice's story, the artist exposes stereotypes about Egyptian culture.

Ianniciello's volume successfully identifies and describes changes in the process of memorialisation linked to migration experiences. The author includes numerous references to the existing scholarship on this topic while, at the same time, developing her own original voice. Ianniciello effectively illustrates how the process of saving memory lies on a time-line connecting past, present and future and whose function is not just representing a collective identity, but shaping or challenging it. The book is intended for a specialised audience such as researchers in the field of arts, Mediterranean and postcolonial studies, museum curators, and archivists.