Eleonora Roaro

A new venture for the CAMeC Project Room which hosts the video installation FIAT 633NM by Eleonora Roaro, the winning project in the public competition Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere promoted by the Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

This Milanese artist was one of the 20 candidates selected out of the total of 93 for the Under-35 Section. The project, curated by Cinzia Compalati, will be presented to the public on Saturday 11 December at 4 p.m. on the occasion of the 17th edition of the Contemporaneo AMACI day.

Cantica21 aims at promoting research and practice in contemporary visual arts by supporting and making known the work of Italian artists and particularly by relaunching them in the cultural systems and on the international markets via the production of new works of art and the organisation of a large multi-site exhibition to be hosted in the various diplomatic/consular headquarters and in the Italian institutes of culture. The initiative hopes to broaden the offer of the country’s artistic potential, promoting the presence of Italian artists in the international contemporary art system. The selected works will in fact be displayed in a large multi-site art exhibition to be hosted in the Italian Institutes of Culture and in the Embassies and Consulates all over the world. Moreover, Cantica21 intends to create a collection of works which will increase Italian public collections of contemporary art, planning and subsequently implementing a series of projects. The work of Eleonora Roaro will enter the collections of the CAMeC, where it is to be displayed for the first time.

For Cantica21 Eleonora Roaro presents a video-installation entitled FIAT 633NM. The project, based on her family archive made up of about 360 photographs from 1937-38, is a critical analysis and deconstruction of the colonial exploits of that time in Italian East Africa (A.O.I., currently Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia), which have often been erased from the collective memory or nostalgically falsified. The video focusses on 52 images of FIAT lorries obsessively photographed on various occasions. Since the infrastructures were for Mussolini a tool of propaganda for emphasising aspects of modernity and progress, the FIAT trucks become a symbol of colonial rhetoric. The images of the lorries interact with the 1930s scenic postcards of the Ethiopian desert, which allude to the colonial idea of unspoilt land to be conquered. These are assembled to create an imaginary landscape, with a background of tape loops of Washint (the traditional Ethiopian wooden flute) prepared by Emiliano Bagnato. The audio track in the foreground, on the other hand, is a manipulation of the  coeval military march “Second Askari Eritrean Fantasy” (from the of State Sound and Audiovideo Archive, Istituto Centrale per I Beni Sonori ed Audivisi) in Rome, in which the Eritrean soldiers of Italian East Africa repeatedly shout “Viva l’Italia” (“Long live Italy”), “Mussolini!”, “Viva il Re” (“Long live the King”) to a hypnotic tribal tune.

Eleonora Roaro (Varese, 1989. She lives and works in Milan.) is a visual artist and researcher. She studied Photography (BA – IED, Milan), Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies (MA – NABA, Milan) and contemporary Art Practice (MA – Plymouth University, Plymouth). Her research focuses on moving images, with a particular interest in video, archival practices and archaeology of the cinema. Her work has been shown since 2011 in numerous museums and galleries such as La Triennale (Milan), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), Casa degli Artisti (Milan), MACRO (Rome), CAMeC (La Spezia). E-Werk (Freiburg), Maison de la Culture (Clermont-Ferrand), La Friche (Marseilles), the University of Udine for the project “Enhanced reality and virtual reality for promotion of the artistic and cultural heritage”; and in 2020 she was resident artist at the Casa degli Artisti (Milan). For 2020-22 she is part of the winning project of the MISTI Global DEED Fund of the MIT (Boston) and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region entitled “Sensing Dolce Vita: an Experiment in VR Storytelling”, co-funded by a grant from the Adolfo Pini Foundation (Milan). Her articles and essays have been published in various journals such as “Alfabeta2”, “Alphaville”, “D’ARS”, “Doppiozero”, “Espoarte”, “Flash Art”, “Juliet”, “Hot Potatoes”, “L’Avventura”, “Nazione Indiana”, “Noemalab”, “Scenari”, “Segno”.
For further info: www.eleonoraroaro.com.