Negotiating Amnesia is an essay film based on research conducted at the Alinari Archive and the National Library in Florence. It focuses on the Ethiopian War of 1935-36 and the legacy of the fascist, imperial drive in Italy.  Through interviews, archival images and the analysis of high-school textbooks employed in Italy since 1946, the film shifts through different historical and personal anecdotes, modes and technologies of representation.

Organised in four chapters, (Heritage vs Memory; Photography vs Memory; Monuments vs Memory; Education vs Memory) it aims to reveal the controversial memory and racist politics characteristic of this historical period and its aftermath, while exposing public and personal strategies of remembering. The film is intended as a performance of a process of self-teaching, becoming aware of the manipulations and silences intrinsic in this history – in order to reflect on personal and collective accountability towards colonial violence.

In its first iteration, Negotiating Amnesia was presented at the 56thFestival dei Popoli, International Documentary Film Festival (Nov-Dec 2015, Florence) as a collateral exhibition that took place at  MAD Murate Art District(Florence). The exhibition presented the film alongside the installation Notes on Historical Amnesia, which displayed the research process and was conceived as a learning resource to be activated and transformed by a series of workshops with high school students. The film was deconstructed to explore its pedagogical potential. Most surfaces were painted in blackboard paint so that the students could intervene on them. Through a teachers’ pack and a workshop, they were introduced to methods for the analysis of images and texts, in order to empower them with the instruments to approach and deconstruct historical and documentary practices in a critical way.