My practice is rooted in lens-based media, (post)colonial and critical whiteness studies, historiographical and archival practices. I am interested in the way historical narratives are produced and how their implied ideologies create subjects - be they individuals or societies. From the position of both insider and outsider to the Italian context, I investigate the Italian archive of coloniality, its foreign and racial politics. Experimenting with the expansion and hybridization of the documentary film, through a positioned and self-reflexive approach my work engages with ‘difficult heritage’, practices of resistance to systemic violence and of historical responsibility. Framed by the device of the ‘essayistic’, intended as a ‘thinking mode’ retaining the structuring elements of the essay within an expanded field, my practice spans across moving image, installation and dialogic formats, as well as writing, publishing, and education.
bio
Alessandra Ferrini is a London-based artist, researcher, educator. She is the recipient of the Maxxi Bvlgari Prize 2022, of the 2017 London Film Festival’s Experimenta Pitch Award and the 2018 Mead Residency at the British School at Rome. She was invited to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa (2024). Solo shows include ar/ge kunst (Bozen 2022) and Villa Romana (Florence 2019). Exhibitions and screenings: 5th Casablanca Biennal (2023), Køs Museum of Art in Public Spaces (Denmark, 2022-23), Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Art (2022), MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki (2021), Manifesta13 Paralléles du Sud (Marseille 2020), Museion Contemporary Art Museum (2020, Bozen), Sharjah Film Platform (2019), Istanbul Biennal collateral (at Depo, 2019), 2nd Lagos Biennal (2019), Manifesta12 Film Programme (Palermo 2018), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin 2018, 2020-2022), 6th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition (2018). Her work features in Dreams Have No Titles, Zineb Sedira’s publication for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and Everything Passes Except the Past - Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums, Film Archives and Public Space (ed. Jana Haeckel, Sternberg Press, 2021). Her writing appears on the Harun Farocki Institute platform, Journal of Visual Culture and in The Entangled Legacies of Empire (ed. Max Haiven et all, Manchester University Press, 2022). She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London and Research Fellow at the British School at Rome.