Working with Visual Documents of the Italian Colonial Heritage
Monday 5th of December 2016, 3.30-6.30pm
Presentations, short-film screenings and Q&A with:
Alessandra Ferrini, Gianmarco Mancosu, Martina Melilli and Jacopo Rinaldi
This Salon brings together artists, filmmakers and historians in order to discuss methodological approaches to the exploration and activation of colonial, archival material. Given the recent interest in the Italian colonial past, the salon aims to shed light onto a previously marginalised historical period.
The first part of the salon will introduce to the fascist imperial project and its legacy through Gianmarco Mancosu's research based on the newsreels on the Ethiopian War of 1935-36 and Alessandra Ferrini's essay film and pedagogic project Negotiating Amnesia (2015), which is based on archival photographs and propaganda postcards from the same period. The second part of the salon will kick off with Martina Melilli's presentation of an ongoing body of work stemming from her family's history in the Libyan colony and in Italy, after the expulsion of Italians from Libya in 1970. It will be followed by Jacopo Rinaldi's problematisation of the truthfulness of archival material, through his research in the Pirelli Historic Archive (Milan), and the production of works exploring the rubber industry. To conclude, the four researchers will be in conversation and will open up the debate to the public.
Free, but seats are limited. To book a place, please email us at mnemoscape@gmail.com
University College London, SH243, 2nd floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
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PROGRAMME
3.30-3.45 Introduction
3.45-4.15 Gianmarco Mancosu
"Deconstructing The Imperial Visual Archive: Production, Reproduction, Resignification Of The Fascist Newsreels On The Ethiopia War." (Includes screening of newsreels)
4.15-4.45 Alessandra Ferrini
"Negotiating Amnesia: Activating Images and Questioning Memories" (Includes screening of excerpts from Negotiating Amnesia, 2015)
4.45-5.00 Break
5.00-5.30 Martina Melilli
"TRIPOLITALIANS: building a personal archive to narrate a shared story." (Includes screening of short films from TRIPOLITALIANS)
5.30-6.00 Jacopo Rinaldi
"Can an Archive Lie?" (Includes screening of A Romance of Rubber, loop, 2015)
6.00-6.30 Q&A and Open Discussion
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BIOS
Alessandra Ferrini is a London-based artist, researcher and educator, co-founding director of the research platform and online magazine Mnemoscape. Her work is rooted in lens-based media, (post)colonial and memory studies, historiographical and archival practices. She holds an MA in Art ad Visual Culture from the University of Westminster.
Gianmarco Mancosu is PhD Student at the University of Warwick. His research interests are the representations of colonialism in Italy between Fascism and the Republic, and related recollections in contemporary visual products. He is currently working on a monograph about the Istituto Luce’s 'Reparto Foto-Cinematografico Africa Orientale', which he studied in his first doctoral work (Cagliari, 2015).
Martina Melilli is an Italian visual artist and filmmaker. She graduated with a master degree in Visual Arts (IUAV), with a major in Documentary and Experimental Cinema (LUCA School of Arts). Her research deal with the representation of the individual and collective imagery in relation with memory and “belonging”.
Jacopo Rinaldi is an artist and researcher living in Rome. He graduated in Milan with a master’s degree in Visual Art and Curatorial Studies at Naba. His research concerns the relation between memory, oblivion and architecture in the transmission of knowledge.
