Invited Speakers

Caterina Borrelli 

Caterina Borrelli is an artist and a filmmaker. Using tools from anthropology, history and media, her work focuses on the interaction of people with the built environment.

Her early documentaries – The Architecture of Mud 1999, and Qudad – reinventing a tradition 2004 - focused on how preservation influences the way a community comes to understand a site as representative of their culture. With the film Asmara, Eritrea 2007, she began exploring the relation between people, memory and place. That work continued with The House He Built 2019, a documentary where she accompanies her father in a traveling exploration of his home; and with the project Memoria necessaria/Memory amiss a four projects – three site-specific interventions and an artist’s book (Via Industriae Publishers, May 2022) - to a selection of Rome’s sites of commemorations of colonial events.

After working primarily in single channel video, since moving to Rome in the Fall of 2008 she has developed projects in mixed media. Her installation afterimages was presented at Art City White Night in Bologna during the Art Fair. The piece is a video projection that runs in a loop in an empty store, over the furniture left over by the previous occupants (May 9 – 15, 2022). It creates a parallel between the empty commercial spaces left in the cities by the COVID 19 pandemia, and home movies as the immaterial trace made by projected light, of something that existed but it is now gone. Produced by Archivio Home Movies (Bologna), afterimages was visible at night from the store’s window on the street. It was then presented in Rome in May 2024 as part of the Unarchive Film Festival.

She is a 2014 recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Award, of the Bogliasco Foundation Residency (2023) and a graduate of the 1987/88 Whitney Museum of American Art I.S.P.

Carmen Belmonte 

Carmen Belmonte is a researcher at Università Roma Tre and the Scientific Coordinator of the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, MPI, within the project SPAZIDENTITÀ co-funded by the École Française de Rome (2022-2026). Her research focuses on the visual culture and legacy of Italian colonialism and fascism, as well as on critical approach to cultural heritage. She has been a research fellow of research and academic institutions, including the LARTTE LAB of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2009-2011); the American Academy in Rome (2019); the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University (2020). Since 2021, she teaches at the University of Florence as an adjunct lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art. Among several articles and book chapters she recently published the book Arte e colonialismo in Italia. Oggetti, immagini, migrazioni (1882-906), Collana del Kunsthistorisches Institut, Venezia, Marsilio, 2021.

Chiara Sbordoni

Chiara Sbordoni is Associate Teaching Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame-Rome. She received her PhD in Italian Renaissance Studies from Sapienza Università di Roma. Her current research concentrates on the representation of Rome in Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, especially in Dante Alighieri’s work. At ND Rome she teaches the foundational course All Roads Lead to Rome. One of the course’s central themes is the history of the Jewish Community of Rome and its physical imprint on the city over time, with particular emphasis on the Fascist period.