In the Egyptian pavilion of Expo 2015, the goddess Isis will guide you through the history of Mediterranean agriculture and cuisine. The four-and-a-half minute movie, which serves as the pavilion's introduction and centerpiece, is scenic and appetizing: a blatant advertisement for the country's beleaguered tourism industry. But for sheer spectacle, even the Egyptian fertility goddess can't compete with the organizers of the 1906 International Exhibition, who erected an entire district of Cairo in Milan.
Dubbed Il Cairo a Milano, the 5,000-square-meter ersatz village included cafés and bazaars and reproductions of monuments, as well as an assortment of typical animals and people to complete the experience. And for those who didn't like it? There was an Eritrean village just down the street.
Postcards and photographs from Il Cairo a Milano are some of the hundreds of fascinating artifacts currently on view at Milan's Museo delle Culture (MUDEC), providing critical context to the extravaganza of Expo 2015. Covering expositions in Milan from 1874 to 1940, the show reveals how shifting economic and political factors impacted the global image encountered by visitors. Seen in retrospect, the motivations for these expositions seem cynical at best, and often downright evil.
Il Cairo in Milano was a site of extreme exoticism, a place where Italians could sample peculiar spices and buy fanciful 'harem' slippers. A source of desire, the city was also presented as primitive, a place where farm animals roamed the streets. In other words, Il Cairo in Milano whetted the Italian appetite for colonialism. (Too bad the British had already claimed Egypt in 1882.)
Over the ensuing decades, international expositions continued to evolve in tandem with colonialism. By the 1930s, as Italy expanded its colonial holdings and ambitions under Fascism, the illusion of exoticism had largely been replaced by one of rationalism, with the presentation of modernist architecture and furnishings suitable for Italian occupation of the African continent. The enchantment of the tortuous souk was supplanted by the enticement of Luigi Piccinato's immaculate casa coloniale – a sort of African Bauhaus.
Of course it's fairly easy to work out economic and political undercurrents of expositions past. What is far more challenging is to understand the subtexts of the current Expo, which simultaneously embraces Slow Food, McDonald's and Bono, not to mention the Egyptian tourism industry. MUDEC doesn't even attempt to sort out the present. That task is up to everyone who visits Expo 2015.
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