What’s wrong with the Rural House? What’s wrong with the Rural House? Fascism and Myth in the Photography of Giuseppe Pagano
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In 1939, Giuseppe Pagano, leading figure of Italian Rationalism, took a dozen photographs of Mussolini’s former editorial office, known as “Il Covo” or “the lair.” The sequence offers a compelling and unexpected lens through which to reconsider Pagano’s long-celebrated Exhibition on Rural Architecture, held at the 1936 Milan Triennale, and praised in historiography as an “anthropological inquiry”—a paradigm shift away from style and received canons in search for truth in the humble, everyday rural environments. Yet, when read alongside his portrayal of Mussolini’s lair, Pagano’s rural images appear far more ambivalent— a visual mode, as Devalle suggests, that combines equal parts realism and myth, whose tendency toward abstraction erases contingencies and class struggles to produce archetypical forms and gestures. This reading complicates the dominant historiography on Pagano’s photography, especially his status as precursor to Neorealist sensibilities, and situates Pagano’s visual practice within recent philosophical reflections on fascism’s capacity to transfigure “reality” through myth.
Source: Burning Farm
DOI: 10.63602/252664
Author: Jolanda Devalle
Institution: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417185756
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