Book Discussion

In recent years, Italy has undergone a significant transformation from a country of emigrants to a nation of immigrants from all over the world. The symposium focusses on Italy’s contemporary culture and representation of migration as well as on reflecting the practices of contemporary filmmaking. It will delve into the intermedial dimension of contemporary experimental cinema, encompassing various forms such as spatial installations and art books, which circulate across different media. Additionally, it will reflect on and probe ideas concerning embodied experience, memory, the diasporic imagination, and human experience amidst political, social, and technological changes.

Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the literary and cinematic representation and self-representation of migrants, and the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism. On these topics, he wrote four documentaries: The Fourth Road (2009; with/about Kaha Mohamed Aden), Aulò (2009; with/about Ribka Sibhatu), Maka (2023; with/about Geneviève Makaping) and Beyond the Frame (2023). Publications in this area also include The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, 2020), The Horn of Africa and Italy (co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, 2018), and L’Italia, l’altrove (2022).

Rosa Barotsi is a lecturer at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is currently heading a project on filmmaking cultures at the margins of the industry in Italy and beyond (IMFilm – NextGeneration EU) and was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with CineAF: Women’s Films in Italy 1965-2015, a project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry. Her research and curatorial work focuses on the intersections between gender and labour in film. Her monograph entitled Time and the Everyday in Contemporary Slow Cinema is forthcoming with ICI Berlin Press.