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Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya
October 18 @ 19:00 - 21:00
Film screening and book launch with Alessandra Ferrini
Speakers: Alessandra Ferrini, Daphne Vitali, Marina Papazyan
Friday, October 18, 19:00
To mark the launch of Alessandra Ferrini’s first monograph, Depo is hosting a screening of Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film (2022) and a conversation between the artist, Daphne Vitali, and Marina Papazyan.
Alessandra Ferrini’s monograph Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya features the artist’s long-term research on the colonial and neo-colonial relations between Italy and Libya. Through a critical engagement with the Italian ‘archive of coloniality’ and its structural violence, it brings together documentation of projects reflecting on positionality, censorship, translation, and the erasure of the genocide perpetrated by the Italians in Libya. Published by Archive Books and commissioned by Villa Romana, the book includes a preface by Bassam El Baroni and contributions by Tewa Barnosa, Adam Benkato, NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, Chiara Cartuccia, Sarri Elfaitouri, Amalie Elfallah, Khaled Mattawa, Maaza Mengiste, Barbara Spadaro and Daphne Vitali.
Gaddafi in Rome: Notes for a Film (2022, 59 minutes, with English subtitles) is an essay film based on the analysis of real-time news documenting a meeting between Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2009. Through the layering and interplay of text, archival imagery, media footage and amateur documentation, it dissects this event of diplomatic friendship to expose the continuing (neo)colonial relations between Italy and Libya.
The event will be in English and registration is not required to participate.
Alessandra Ferrini is a visual artist, researcher and educator based in the UK. Questioning the legacies of Italian colonialism and Fascism, her work experiments with the expansion and hybridization of the documentary medium. Winner of the Maxxi Bvlgari Prize 2022, she has exhibited internationally, including at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts London.
Daphne Vitali is a curator and writer from Athens and Rome. She is a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (ΕΜΣΤ). She has curated exhibitions internationally in institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale, Rome; Museo Novecento, Florence; Depo, Istanbul; MOMus Thessaloniki; rongwrong, Amsterdam; etc. She is interested in artistic practices that are rooted in social, political and ecological issues. Her recent curatorial practice has focused on research-based practices and the historiographic turn in contemporary art as a means of investigating and interpreting the present.
Marina Papazyan is a writer and artist from Istanbul. Their works, which often incorporate sound, video and found materials, largely draw on their essay and fiction writing. Their texts are concerned with representations and intersections of monstrousness and disease; queer genders and erotics; (post-)Ottoman imperialisms, and the various liberation movements that resist them. They are also a programme coordinator at Depo and co-run the BAS Artists’ Book Collection, Istanbul.
The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2023).
With the support of Triangle-Astérides, Marseille; Depo, Istanbul; L’Art Rue, Tunis; MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.