by Caterina Borelli
video installation, mono channel, audio, 9′ 43” loop

afterimages describes the first few months of life in the city where my parents settled in 1950. The narration is made up of excerpts from the diary written by them, Sergio Borelli and Giovanna Moro.
My father won a UNESCO scholarship for journalists in the U.K., which led him to work for various newspapers in port locations. My mother joined him after a month. They were both already writing for L’Avanti, and in London the diary reveals that to cover expenses they sent articles to many different newspapers using pseudonyms. When my mother writes that she will sign articles with her name it reveals what a great achievement this is for her. The pictures and diary record the discovery of the city and a life in which letters were sent and received daily, phone calls were difficult and expensive, and all expenses were meticulously recorded.

Putting the family things in order, I found a box with a Pathe Baby 9.5mm camera and projector with a series of small reels which are now part of the heritage of Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia. The films were shot mainly by my father, a few scenes also by my mother, and others by my paternal grandfather.

Those films give us back my parents before the birth of us four daughters. The images brought back to me a presence that no longer exists, and when Home Movies asked me to do a project with this material, I wanted to address this immateriality. It was the time of COVID. The choice of an empty store for installation is not accidental. The pandemic has forced many merchants to close, and the fear of contagion has changed our behaviors and cities. The urban landscape is no longer the same as we were used to. Stores have left traces of their presence in empty storefronts, where we often still see the marks left by the items that were on display.

Even family films are a trace of something that is no longer there. They are “beyond memory,” appearances that prompt an emotional reaction. In working with my parents’ family films, I was interested in using this sense of present immateriality, of fleeting appearance of something that existed, of afterimage.

afterimages was first presented at Art City White Night from May 7 to 15, 2022 in Bologna. It could be seen between 8 p.m. and midnight from the window overlooking the porch of the store located at 118/A Mascarella Street. Speakers placed outside allowed passersby to hear the audio. The projection was on the walls and structures left behind by the previous trade.

Caterina Borelli
Caterina Borelli is a filmmaker and artist. Her works, at the intersection of media, anthropology and history, focus on the interaction between people, architecture and place. Beginning with the film Asmara, Eritrea (2007), Caterina’s research particularly investigates the relationship between place and memory. Since 2019, she has been developing “Necessary Memory,” four intervention projects on some of the colonial memory sites in Rome, part of which is a book published in 2022 in collaboration with the Museum of Civilizations, Rome and the publisher viaindustriae of Foligno.
A graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s ISP in New York (1987/88), Caterina’s films have been shown in international museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC; the British Museum in London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid); and are part of the collection of the Fundaçao Serralves (Porto) and il Mambo (Bologna). For her projects Caterina has received support from institutions such as the Graham Foundation in Chicago, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arteleku (Bilbao) and MIC (2021). She also received the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Award (2014) and the Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship Award (2022).
Since 2017, she has been responsible for the Moro Roma iconographic archive, a collection of social and political images spanning the 20th century.