Personal biography, family and historical memories are the main sources from which Alessandra Cianelli’s film – co-directed with friend, artist and filmmaker Opher Thomson – draws. All’aldilàdiqua is part of the artistic project “The land of the Overseas Territories”, on which the artist has been working since 2012 producing several short films and performances. In this video-telling Cianelli’s family stories meet the History of colonialism and the western mythology of construction of a modern nation. At the heart of the story, the drive for the research itself, is the figure of the maternal grandfather, who – as the artist says in a pun – departed and disappeared after being enlisted to reach the Italian lands overseas and take part in Mussolini’s imperial-colonial enterprise. The film merges found footage, collage, sound mixing, writing, and vocal performance. All these elements and techniques are used to question how the removal of the colonial past from the Italian History acts on the personal level and how we could react to oblivion. The narrative is fragmented, non-linear, syncopated. The plot is continuously interrupted and resumed, it is structured on different overlays of images, sounds, words, speeches, languages, tones. The artist-explorer embarks on a journey, moving along historical remains of a silenced past and the voids of the present. The story begins in 2007, when Cianelli’s grandmother died bequeathing two letters from 1940 that her husband had sent from Cyrenaica; then we are in 2011, when the artist has started her own journey in search of the missing grandfather, somehow embracing and re-elaborating the wave of protests sparking unrest in the South Mediterranean world, weaving the plot of historical and geographical conjuntures unexpected to her; then back in 1896, when the Italian Army is heavily defeated during the battle of Adwa; and again in 2011 and 2007. A moment later we are in 1940 – a very crucial moment. The voice of the newsreel by the Giornale Luce of 17th May 1940 recalls the days of the majestic inauguration and opening of the Triennial Exhibition of the Italian Land Overseas (now Mostra d'Oltremare) in Napoli, commissioned by Benito Mussolini to celebrate the birth of the Ethiopian Empire. Once a symbol of the hubris of the Italian colonial empire, today it clearly symbolises the debris of the empire of the future. The camera takes us “out there elsewhere over here”, into this “fanta-exotic” place built by colonialism with the aim to construct “italianness” and to let the Italians live the overseas experience at home. A mix of archive images and shots taken by the artist in the past six years document the original exhibition complex and highlight the relationship between historical removal and current neglect. Around the abandoned pavilions where Africa Orientale Italiana was invented and exhibited, it is nature – today luxuriant and uncontrolled, an “involuntary jungle” – that has taken possession of the complex. Maps and blueprints overlapped on the images of dusty spaces defaced and left to neglect. The water of the pond reflects the face of what was once the dream of a modern city, today only the trace of an unconscious nostalgia for that colonial science fiction. Images of everyday life flow unsuspectingly outside the walls of the complex and in the surrounding of some of its buildings, now serving as leisure centres. The evocative power of sound and music accompanies and enhances the flow of words and images. The sounds of water, sea waves, human footsteps, animal verses, human breath mix with the voices from the Arab Spring, with the words of the Prime Minister Francesco Crispi when he was in Massaua, with the refrains of old Italian and Neapolitan songs dedicated to the colonies (“La sagra di Giarabub”, “Tripoli Bel Sud d’Amore”, “O Tripulino Napulitano”), with the sound of The Lion of the desert, the film dedicated to Omar al-Mukhtar’s resistance in Libya. While listening we can also recognize the soundtrack of the famous film-series Sandokan, as well as an excerpt from La Sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini, sang by Maria Callas, conflicting with the reggae rhythm of “Battle of Adowa”, where Ras Ibi & The Soldiers pay homage to King Menelik’s victory over the Italian Army. In the lost city of ultramarine desire, natural, architectural and social archives transform each other foreseeing a future to come, where the past that has never passed will be re-written by new perceptive possibilities. A perennial effect of cross-fading simulates the simultaneity of life events and the non-linearity of history. Some scenes become almost still-images with a strongly pictorial texture. The transition makes them abstract, visionary, dreamlike, in a space that narrows and unfolds at the same time, also synchronized with other temporalities. Memory acts as a technology to deterritorialize and reterritorialize places, fragments of time and sounds in search of ways to imagine and process a past that has been robbed and ostracised. As the artist seems to suggest, the sense of the future - its fantasies and its rebuilding - lies in the technological expedients of investigation through recollection. A future in which the projection of the past balances its traumatic weight with the need of acts of imagination. (Alessandra Ferlito and Olga Solombrino)