Artist's Statement

My practice encompasses the moving image and photography and is rooted in history and poetry. Acting as an archaeologist and a storyteller, I draw upon personal and collective memory to reveal stories that official historical accounts have failed to tell. I approach the photographic image as a space of encounter with the past. For me photography is a subversive commemorative form – an anti-monument. Each photograph is like a raw history which calls for elaboration, attention and understanding, a memory-work which starting from the everyday, personal, the affective and micro-historical allows us to articulate questions which have a bearing on the understanding of larger historical phenomena. I am working on an essay film, Family Remains, on the memory (or better, the erasure of memory) of Fascism in my Italian family.  This project is a lyrical film and a contribution to public history which seeks to heighten the visibility of the lived reality of Fascism, the destructive effects of its violence and the silencing of its experience.  I am interested in slowing down our relation to images and developing an ability to look at, read and “listen” to photographs, a form of attentiveness, not just to the past but to orienting ourselves in the present.