Notes on Historical Amnesia
museum education programme and collaborative filmmaking, 2015-2017
Notes on Historical Amnesia is a parallel education project for high schools that has been developed around the video Negotiating Amnesia.
In PART 2 (2017), through a series of film screenings, workshops and seminars exploring different techniques to question photographic representation and historical narratives, I have worked with high school students in order to produce a series of short essay-films based on the archival photographs of the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36 that I have previously employed to produce the film Negotiating Amnesia. For the final exhibition, I have devised a video installation that features both the work produced by the students and my own response to it. The installation uses different screens (tablets and different monitors) and filters (glass and magnifying lenses) in order to force the viewer to continuously re-negotiate his viewpoint and so to shift his/her viewing perspective. Ultimately, the work aims to provoke a reflection on the way historical narratives are created, on issues such as perspective, distance and point of view, as well as on the multiplicity of readings that each archival source can hold.
PART 1 (2015) was a programme delivered at Murate Art District in Florence, for which I devised an installation to be used and intervened on during workshops with high school classes. The students interacted with the modules, providing an ever-evolving installation that included a wide breath of reflections and interventions.
Read more (Italian only):
Negotiating Amnesia: forme di attivazione e traduzione dell'archivio fotografico coloniale italiano - a cura di InteRGRace, University of Padua Press
Notes on Historical Amnesia PART 2 was a pedagogic programme delivered in collaboration with Francesca Chiara. Commissioned by Ma*Ga Museum of Contemporary Art (Gallarate, Italy), taking place between February and May 2017. The installation was exhibited in the exhibition Global Learning (2017) at Ma*Ga, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni.
Participating schools: Liceo Artistico Statale Paolo Candiani – Coreutico Musicale Pina Bausch (Busto Arsizio) and Liceo Artistico Statale Frattini (Varese)