Negotiating Amnesia

Negotiating Amnesia is an essay film posing a meditation on a semi-forgotten chapter of twentieth century Italian history: its colonial past and, in particular, the Ethiopian War of 1935-36. This period is chosen because of its connections with fascism and its imperial project. Through interviews, archival images and the analysis of high-school textbooks, the film shifts through an array of different historical and personal narratives. In so doing it aims at revealing the amnesic politics that accompany this historical period, while exposing public and personal strategies of remembering and forgetting. The film is divided in small chapters, each serving as a reflection on the role of images, monuments and pedagogical texts in the creation of public memory. The first chapter, Heritage vs Memory presents interviews with two heirs of photographs of the Ethiopian War, exploring their relation with the collections and their contrasting ideologies that, in turn, are reflected in the way they preserve such images. Photography vs Memory offers an analysis of two collections of photographs found within the Alinari Archive (Florence, IT), exposing and deconstructing the colonial gaze. Monuments vs Memory attempts at revealing how memorialising practices can, instead, promote forgetfulness. This is narrated through the stories of three monuments linked to the Ethiopian War: the Monumento al Soldato Africano (Siracusa, 1952) the Obelisk of Axum, and the mausoleum to Roberto Graziani (Affile, Rome, 2012). The last chapter, Education vs Memory , exposes the different narratives that have been promoted around the issue of Italian colonialism, within the Italian education system from 1946 to today. Revealing an absence of criticality within this subject and a detachment from postcolonial debates, the film finally poses the question of how this ingrained drive to forget has, indeed, colonised contemporary Italian society.