From issue: #27 Emerging Talent
Eva Rivas Bao, An Italian Story
In An Italian Story, Eva Rivas Bao revisits the life and unresolved death of Imane Fadil, an Italian-Moroccan model and aspiring sports journalist who became a central witness in the trial against former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi. Fadil testified about the abuse of power and the exploitation of women that took place at Berlusconi’s private residence during the so-called Bunga Bunga parties. In 2019, shortly after announcing the publication of her book, she died in suspicious circumstances at the age of thirty-four.
The project draws on fragments of the Berlusconian era, particularly its hollowed-out representation of women. Using artificial intelligence, Rivas Bao manipulates archival materials and personal photographs taken at Fadil’s former home in Milan. She attempts to recreate the missing pictures Fadil claimed to have shared in court, images that never publicly surfaced. She deconstructs An Italian Story, the title of a propaganda magazine once published by Berlusconi, and rebuilds it into a counter-narrative. The result is a collective memory formed from digital rubble, shaped by a national failure to reckon with its own Me Too moment.
Born in Milan in 2001, Rivas Bao is an Italian-Argentinian photographer whose work merges documentary research with digital manipulation. Her images begin as straightforward observations but are later altered through post-production, creating hybrids between reality and simulation, between amateur intimacy and the codes of pop culture. She studied New Technologies of Art at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and later completed a master’s degree in photography at ECAL in Lausanne.
