until Sunday January 06 2013
MAMBO
T : +39 051 6496611
via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologne
Italy
info@mambo-bologna.org
www.mambo-bologna.org
The Remains of the Father – Fragments of a Trilogy (Transhumance), from which the exhibition curated by Elisa Del Prete takes its name, represents the first part in a trilogy in which the artist undertakes a reflective and imaginative journey through a subject that has still been not received enough investigation, such as the Italian colonial history in Eritrea during the Fascist regime.
The work is the result of a residence programme undertaken by Bridget Baker in Bologna during the course of 2012 on the invitation of Nosadella.due – Independent Residency for Public Art. During this period the artist developed her project based through various explorations of Italy's archives and libraries, meetings with historians, cinema experts, psychologists, sociologists, architects and exponents of eritrean community in Italy.
Recovering traces recorded in the official history – from propaganda cinema to the official correspondence preserved in the archives of the Foreign Affairs Ministry – together with fragments of the experiences of private individuals – drawn from conversations, literary travel accounts and diaries – the artist has put together a hybrid and discontinuous vision which she considers has “Many voices, but none that could tell the whole story together”.
With the work presented at MAMbo, Baker reveals the complexity of the historic reconstruction, choosing to bring out “missing” memory that always underlies what is officially transmitted.
She considers the case of a Bolognese couple Giovanni Ellero and Maria Pia Pezzoli who lived in Italian Eastern Africa during Ellero’s employment as a clerk at the Ministry of Italian Africa between 1936 and 1941. Their personal archives – now conserved at the Department of History, Anthropology and Geography at the University of Bologna and in the Archiginnasio Civic LIbrary – offer significant inroads into historical, anthropological and linguistic research at the time of the Italian African project.
