Rs project proposal

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Introduction

It’s probably safe to state that a number of people spend part of their teenage years thinking their family is the most dysfunctional out there. I, for one, was under this impression. Now that age released me from the spell of exceptionality, even of the negative kind, I know that every family has dysfunctional sides to it to account for. Indeed, it would seem that being dysfunctional is in the natural order of family affairs. This is why I was not too shocked not long ago when, after looking for details on web archives and forums related to an album of photographs from Africa in the mid-30s that has been in my family’s possession for decades, I learned that my maternal grandfather was a Black Shirt (a member of the MVSN, that is to say, the voluntary fascist militia) who fought in the second Italo-Ethiopian war. It’s quite matter-of-fact: from a historical perspective, my grandfather was a villain—and of the worst kind.

I never met my grandfather, as he was dead almost one decade before I was born. Pictures of him and by him were, together with random documents and words from other members of the family, the only traces that he actually ever existed. The album was a very peculiar trace of him, as the pictures in it were from a world that no one else in our family had ever been part of. It was a world that cut us all off. Some of the photos the album contained terrified me; nevertheless, they became part of my childhood's visual imagination, as much as reproductions of Pellizza’s The Fourth State or the pink elephants in Dumbo. For years the album in question was stashed in various bookshelves, first in my grandmother’s sitting room, then in my own, in turns rubbing elbows with The Woman’s Encyclopedia (from grandmother) and books on the collections of the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre (from my parents). It was therefore a common sight, and yet at the same time it was a lost relic. Nobody spoke about it, nobody seemed to know exactly what was in it, and why.


What do you want to make

As I have inherited the infamous album, I now feel a certain responsibility to understand it. This is a crucial reason why the final project I have in mind for this year wants to explore it as a space where, for good or bad, the imagination of a singular person came alive. I want to explore the album's ties with what surrounded it, which means, among other things, the possibility of dealing with what its construction meant and the inevitable consequences it produced.

In more practical terms, I want to attempt a deconstruction of the album. The object album has always been a veritable totem, keeping watch and influencing its surroundings in sure even though imperceptible ways. As objects are never innocent even when we perceive them as such, I can see how the diffusion of objects of this kind—in homes like mine and elsewhere—must have exercised a silent authority over time, with consequences that are still in plain view today. Hence, I see a deconstruction of this specific object as a metaphorical act, not only of acknowledgement of this authority, but also of neutralization of the same.

At the end of the journey, I plan to have a publication in the shape of the thesis, which documents the process of physical and conceptual dismembering, and a multimedia work that will comprise still and moving images taken from, connected to and/or inspired by the album. The thesis wouldn’t in this manner be limited to an explanation of the practice-based work, but a parallel work on the same subject, either its foundation or an expansion.


How do you want to make it

First of all, I want to spend enough time to study the context that made the album possible: naturally, the nationalist and imperialist impulses present within the socio-political climate of the time are the foremost referents I need to face. I also want to grasp the contemporary visual culture—the diffusion of private photo albums for instance—side by side with popular forms of expression such as cinema and literature that may have influenced it, even indirectly. There is an abundance of information on the subject and I plan to read and watch on it, at least in part, while I keep developing my project.

At the moment I am trying to gather basic information on the album’s photographs, not so much for a need for absolute historical accuracy, but be able to penetrate its essence. Part of the fascination of this project for me is after all in the realization that the album is a cipher which I will not be able to solve entirely. Therefore, I assume that my research will be an open ended one. I will of course need to make scans from the album, to have documentation and also to be able to manipulate its contents as the project dictates. The acts of scanning and scrutinizing I see as integral steps in the project’s development.


Who can help you to make it

As much as I am wary of it at the moment, I believe it will be necessary to start a conversation about the album with the surviving members of my family—that is, mostly, my mother. It will also be extremely important for me to have a continuous flow of feedback, and to receive suggestions about additional information that may help me finding the most appropriate angle and tone to approach the research as I progress. In addition to the above, I can foresee that I will need technical advice, concerning the most efficient and effective ways to make use of available tools, and this in strict relation with the material at hand.


Why do you want to make it

I want to make use of the album’s defined theatrical character, as this very character I can see as the most accessible reading entry to interpreting a larger social context. I want therefore to use this character as speculative matter, to test the limits between the private and the public. Through this work, I am not looking to give an answer to the many questions that the present moment is posing with ever increasing urgency, but to better frame them through a process of visual and verbal dismantling and reshaping.

I feel the idea behind this project has a connection with the present moment, not so much within the obvious discussion about resurgence of extreme right wing tendencies in Europe—which certainly is a pertinent one to be noted—but mostly within a discourse on historical memory and amnesia, on the marked fictional element in both.


Relation with previous practice

Previously, I developed work that questioned understanding of historical micro- and macro-events connecting them with our visual culture, imposing on these events a forced perspective, that of spatial imagination. This forced perspective was especially evident, even though in varying degrees, in the body of work produced in the course of the last academic year, and it was interwoven with preoccupations concerning the notion of ambiguity in morality of the single as opposed to external impositions—from communities, societies, states, and so on. In several pieces, factual information from diverse sources, with special attention to mass media, was abstracted from its original context in order to expand its scope. This movement towards abstraction and the process of deconstruction-reconstruction was for instance at the core of Universal Time and Repérages, both making use of archival and found imagery to reflect on the destructive effects that faceless power in its various forms has on the individual. Both these works isolated secondary elements present in source imagery and made them the dominant of the reconstruction.

It’s my intention for the graduation work to stem from these previously explored themes; I also want to make use of some of the experiences gathered in my recent practice, both in the researching and making stages. Even though this means I expect the new work to entertain a dialogue with what came before it, I however don’t plan for it to be a pure repetition of a scheme. What I would like to do is to move forward on the path of blending the boundary between authentically photographic and computer generated, still and moving image, in view of the construction of a semi-fictional space and story deriving directly from the examination of the album.


References
This is a tentative bibliography of texts in continuous expansion that I plan to use both for better placing my planned work into context and as a reference for the making of the work itself.

Bibliography:

  • Benjamin, W., 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version). [PDF] In: in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press, pp 19-55. Available at: Monoskop <http://monoskop.org/Benjamin> [Accessed October 1 2018].
  • Berger, J., 2015. Bento’s Sketchbook. London: Verso.
  • Bhabha, H.K., 2012, The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism. In: The Location of Culture. [E-Book] New York: Routledge. Available through: Koninklijke Bibliotheek ebook catalogue <https://www.kb.nl> [Accessed 23 September 2018].
  • Bolognari, M. ed., 2012. Lo Scrigno Africano. La memoria fotografica della guerra d'Etiopia custodita dalle famiglie italiane. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
  • Brunetta, G.P., 2004, Dalle origini alla seconda guerra mondiale. In: Cent’anni di cinema Italiano. Bari: Editori Laterza. Ch. 10-14.
  • Buzzati, D., Il Deserto dei Tartari.
  • Del Boca, A., 2014, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale, vol. 2, La Conquista dell'Impero [E-book]. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. Available at: Amazon.de <http:// www.amazon.de> [Accessed 19 September 2018]
  • Del Boca, A., 2014, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale, vol. 4, Nostalgia delle Colonie [E-book]. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. Available at: Amazon.de <http:// www.amazon.de> [Accessed 19 September 2018]

Angelo Del Boca is regarded as the one of the foremost historians on Italian colonial history. The series of books Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale (The Italians in Oriental Africa), in four volumes, was originally published between the second half of the 70s and the first of the 80s, this was among the first well-researched and documented publications that questioned the myth, perpetuated also by the media, that Italian colonial rule was not as ruthless as that of other European powers. The books written by Del Boca were actually the first that started a conversation on the subject in Italy, and initially not without difficulties. The two volumes of this work I especially will focus on are on the years of the Fascist-branded imperialistic expansion in Ethiopia and on the aftermath of the fall of the so-called Oriental African Empire (AOI) a handful of years after its proclamation.

  • Falasca-Zamponi, S., 1997. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Flaiano, E., 2004, Tempo di Uccidere. Milan: BUR.

Ennio Flaiano is mostly known abroad for his screenplays for directors as Fellini and Antonioni; even in Italy he is mostly remembered for his short prose and contributions as a journalist and critic, especially on cinema. Tempo di Uccidere (Time to Kill) is Flaiano’s sole foray into novel writing. It is based on a diary the writer kept at the time he took part in the second Italo-Abyssinian war (1935-36), an experience that was pivotal not only in his life but also on the direction of his career. The story follows the wanderings of a heedless Italian lieutenant in Ethiopia as they gradually become an inescapable spiral dragging him further and further downwards. With absurdist traits that evoke The Stranger, the book brings forward a portrayal of the Fascist imperialist endeavor and mindset as a kind of insidious nameless malady with disastrous consequences for the individual.

  • Frazer, J.G., The Golden Bough.
  • Gadda, C.E., 2008. Eros e Priapo (Da furore a cenere). In: Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti: 2. Milan: Garzanti Libri.

Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote the satiric pamphlet Eros e Priapo (Eros and Priapus) between 1941 and 1945. Mostly written in a prose reminiscent of the Florentine style from the 1500, the work is a linguistic patchwork which borrows elements not only from an archaic Italian language of Tuscan flavor, but also from modern-day regional dialects. The content of the pamphlet is a ferocious attack to the Fascist regime, written during its last years, and in particular to the figure of Benito Mussolini. Gadda however never names directly Fascism and Mussolini, the focus of his attacks, but chooses instead a plethora of epithets and wordplays, at the same time using as a reference for the tone of his invective religious texts as the Book of Revelation. In the author’s intention, the work was to be a sort of psychopathology of Fascism, albeit presented in a bizarre, idiosyncratic form. Gadda’s manuscript was initially rejected as too vulgar by publishers. A version amended and censored by the author was published years later; only recently the original text has resurfaced.

  • Ginzburg, C., 2007. Minutiae, Close‐up, Microanalysis. [PDF] In: Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, pp. 174–189. Available through: JSTOR, <www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/526091> [Accessed September 30 2018].
  • Kracauer, S., 2014. The Past’s Threshold. Essays on photography. [E-book] Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes. Available through: Koninklijke Bibliotheek<https://www.kb.nl> [Accessed 30 September 2018].
  • Labanca, N., 2015, Una guerra per l'Impero. Memorie della campagna d’Etiopia, Bologna: Il Mulino.
  • Langford, M., 2001. Suspended Conversations. The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. [Ebook] Montreal: McGill’s-Queen University Press. Available through: Koninklijke Bibliotheek ebook catalogue <https://www.kb.nl> [Accessed 30 September 2018].
  • Palumbo, P. ed, 2003. A Place in the Sun. [PDF] Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Available at: LibGen [Accessed October 8 2018].
  • Pratt, H., 2005. O Desejo de Ser Inútil. Entrevistas com Dominique Petifaux. Translated from the French by Sabler, A. Lisbon: Relogio D’Água Editores.
  • Ricci, S., 2008. Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943. [Ebook] CA: University of California Press. Available through: Hogeschool Rotterdam e-book collection. [Accessed 24 September 2018] (306106)
  • Sebald, W.G., 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction [E-book]. New York: Random House. Available at: Amazon.com <http:// www.amazon.com> [Accessed 22 September 2018]
  • Sebald, W.G., 1999. The Rings of Saturn [E-book]. New York: New Directions. Available at: Amazon.co.uk <http:// www.amazon.co.uk> [Accessed 18 September 2018]

Half memoir, half essay, Sebald’s book is a hybrid collection-recollection of facts, places and images, gathered during long and solitary wanderings. These form the groundwork for an existential reflection blending fact and fiction set against the background of the many anonymous towns, desolate beaches and overgrown gardens of Suffolk. In The Rigs of Saturn, East Anglia becomes the symbol of post-colonial disintegration, with its long history of violence and human madness orbiting around its present-day humdrum ambiguity as the planetary debris of the rings of Saturn.

  • Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

In this essay Sontag questions the connection between image making, cruelty and audience response through the analysis of representations of violence—in visual arts as painting, but especially in photography. What are the moral and ethical implications of taking pictures depicting war for instance, what are the effects on the spectator who is exposed to them, how effective a medium photography is for getting to know the trauma of the victims of unspeakable violence, are some of the questions the book poses. The essay can be put into more accurate perspective if seen as a continuation of the discourse started by Sontag with her previous On Photography.

  • Stokes, P., 1992. The Family Photograph Album: So Great a Cloud of Witnesses. In: G. Clarke, ed. The Portrait in Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Ch.10.
  • Trubiano, M.S., 2010. Ennio Flaiano and his Italy: postcards from a changing world. [PDF] Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Available at: Koninklijke Bibliotheek ebook catalogue <https://www.kb.nl> [Accessed 28 September 2018].


Filmography:

  • Karins Ansikte (Karin’s Face), 1986. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden: Cinematograph AB.
  • Vidros Partidos (Broken Windows), 2012. Directed by Victor Erice. Portugal: Nautilus Films.
  • Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence before Bach), 2007. Directed by Pere Portabella. Spain: Films 59.
  • News from Home, 1977. Directed by Chantal Ackerman. France/Belgium: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), Paradise Films, Unité Trois, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF).


Small compendium of Italian cinema from the colonial years (30s-40s):

  • Lo Squadrone Bianco, 1936. Directed by Augusto Genina. Italy: Roma Film.
  • Scipione l'Africano, 1937. Directed by Carmine Gallone. Italy: Consorzio "Scipione, ENIC.
  • Luciano Serra Pilota, 1938. Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. Italy: Aquila Cinematografica.
  • Sotto la Croce del Sud, 1938. Directed by Guido Brignone. Italy: Mediterranea Film.
  • Abuna Messias, 1939. Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. Italy: Romana Editrice Film.
  • Bengasi, 1942. Directed by Augusto Genina. Italy: Film Bassoli.
  • Giarabub, 1942. Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. Italy: Scalera Film.

Others:

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