Speaker: Stefano Ossicini
Professor emeritus. Department of Engineering Sciences and Methods, 
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia - CNR Nanoscience Institute, 
Modena - National Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Modena 

The seminar starts from the story of Angelo Soliman, an African child 
who arrived in Sicily around 1730. From a slave he first becomes a 
free man, a valiant soldier, then a tutor to noble scions of the 
Austrian court in Vienna, and finally a respected member of an important
 lodge Masonic, as well as husband and father of noblewomen and friend 
of the Emperor. Upon his sudden death in 1796, his body was seized and
 dismembered; a mannequin is constructed from his stuffed skin and 
displayed to the public in a sort of ethno-pornographic exhibition 
in a "Wunderkammer", a cabinet of wonders. 
What happened? What led to all this? 
To answer these questions and to explain the most disturbing aspects 
of this story, we must go back to the last decades of the eighteenth 
century, when we witnessed a real scientific and cultural paradigm 
shift compared to the Western way of looking at men. 
Change also due to the work of the most important philosophers 
and scientists of the Enlightenment. Upon his death, Soliman is 
reduced to the color of his skin: he disappears as a person, as 
an individual, to be classified, without possibility of escape, 
in a new category, within a new concept, that of "race", which
 places him on one of the lowest steps, as a savage without 
the possibility of change.