This talk interrogates the ways hydropolitics, or the relation between bodies of water, political power and transnational capitalism, shaped artistic production between Italy and Egypt in the 1950s through the 1960s. It situates a sculptural seascape by the Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro, exhibited at the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries in 1959, within a shifting Mediterranean imaginary between Italy and Egypt. In the context of the Biennale, Pomodoro’s Another Horizon may be seen through the lens of a novel Italian strategy for energy procurement in North Africa and West Asia. The talk expands questions of hydropolitics beyond the Mediterranean, towards a system of interconnected waterways including the Suez Canal and the Aswan High Dam, which in 1950s Egypt came to symbolise the “modernisation” programme spearheaded by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Embodying the ambitions of an increasingly authoritarian Egyptian government, these colossal hydraulic systems became sites for artists and cultural producers to articulate divergence from state authority. Ultimately, this talk attends to a body of Italian and Egyptian artistic production contending with the identification of political authority with the ownership, rearrangement and management of bodies of water.

Image: Altro Orizzonte (1958-1959), Arnaldo Pomodoro, photograph by Aldo Ballo, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro