Collezione CAMeC Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia.
Winning work of the public notice ‘Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere’ – Section under 35 promoted by MAECI-DGSP and MiC-DGCC.
BIOGRAPHY
Eleonora Roaro (Varese, 1989) is a visual artist and researcher based in Milan. She studied photography at IED in Milan, Visual Arts and Cultural Studies at NABA and Contemporary Art Practice at Plymouth University. Her works often result from deep research in archival material, highlighting, through moving images, submerged stories and unconventional details removed from or distorted by collective and individual memories. Since 2011, her works have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including La Triennale, Milan; Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan; Casa degli Artisti, Milan; Museo Diffuso, Turin; CAMERA, Turin; MACRO, Rome; CAMeC, La Spezia; E-Werk, Freiburg; Maison de la Culture, Clermont-Ferrand; La Friche, Marseilles; Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Madrid-Prague. Her academic work involves teaching at NABA and IED in Milan as well as publishing essays in academic magazines such as L’avventura, Alphaville and LabCom.
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WORK ON DISPLAY
FIAT 633NM, 2021
HD video loop, b/n, Sound
04:10 min
The work puts in sequence fifty-two photographs from 1937-38, belonging to the artist’s grandfather, portraying moments of Italian colonialism in what is now Ethiopia. In the background of groups of colonizers and colonized people there is always a FIAT truck, usually model 633NM. Photographic obsession with transportation used to be essential to fascist propaganda, which legitimized colonial violence by promoting the supply of modernity to the occupied territories. These were considered virgin landscapes to conquer, as stressed in the second level of the work, consisting of enlargements of panoramic postcards of Ethiopian desert: also found in the artist’s grandfather’s archive, they reveal the colonizing gaze of the photographer. The soundtrack matched with the carousel of these landscapes is a propagandist recording from Istituto Luce, reproducing Eritrean soldiers in Monte Sacro paying tribute to Mussolini by altering an Amharic song with exclamations such as «Duce!», «Viva l’Italia!», and «Viva il Re!».