The project grew out of a series of performative actions performed by different women in the kitchen. These actions were later edited and reconstructed during the editing process, along with archival home movies. In these, the female body becomes an expressive medium that irreverently occupies space, breaking with traditional forms of representation. Building on this idea, the work invites reflection on the gender roles still present in our society. This set of visual references allows new interpretations of canonical narratives: rather than offering definitive answers, the installation poses questions and proposes an open dialogue between the viewer and the work, understood as object, action and experience.

Casa Borelli is a space in the Festival dedicated to presenting contemporary art installations. Each year I invite an artist to create a work that uses archival images and is visible from the window overlooking the cul-de-sac next to the cinema in Trastevere. Casa Borelli offers the public a different way of enjoying archival materials and their re-interpretations, while remaining in tune with UnArchive’s editorial approach. In fact, by presenting works that develop in space, as the installations are, it proposes an alternative and complementary vision to that offered in the Festival halls. The collaboration began in 2024 with the installation afterimages, in which I used footage of my family to evoke the sense of immateriality of the fleeting appearance of what existed, thus restoring that presence of absence intrinsic to film projection. In 2025 Aušra Lukošiūnienė presented Tempo passato perfetto in Rome, in which the Lithuanian artist reconstructed a map of the city through photographs and films of the family of Stasys Lozoraitis, Lithuania’s last ambassador to Italy before Soviet annexation in 1940. By tracing the places of his life and that of his family, the work restores the continuing resilience of a figure who later became a symbol in his homeland of national independence. This year Basque artist Estibaliz Sádaba Murguía presents a collage of images from family films, in which scenes of Italian women’s domestic life are intertwined with performative gestures made in a kitchen. The precariousness of balance in the steps on high heels, filmed by the artist, creates a direct relationship with the claustrophobic life of the women depicted in the archival films shot within the domestic space. Through irreverent gestures and a certain irony, (Re)Constructing the Domestic makes visible one of the conditions of gender segregation from which we still struggle to emerge.

Estibaliz Sádaba Murguía

Artist and PhD in Art and Research from the University of the Basque Country (EHU). Throughout her career, she has produced videos, performances, installations, and sound works. In her most recent projects, she has sought to reflect on the historical difficulties women have faced in interacting with public space and their confinement to the domestic sphere. Since her beginnings in the early 1990s, she has been committed to a political stance toward everyday reality, always from a creative perspective. Through these feminist and experimental works, she seeks to convey collective, personal and historical experiences.