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About

I am a researcher and documentary filmmaker with a strong interest in ethnography and sound.

Since 2022 I am a PhD Student at the Department of Italian Studies at New York University, where I also pursue a joint degree in Culture & Media, a practice-based program in ethnographic filmmaking.

I received a BA in Drama, Arts and Music Studies from the University of Bologna and an MA in Cultural History and Theory from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

That night he spoke to the gauchos gathered in the general store. I believe we are losing our memory, he said. And about time, too.


SOME THOUGHTS ALOUD

Much of my work starts from or leads me back to memory and sound, and thus to silence and forgetting.

I am particularly interested in voice, and in its many intertwined meanings: as a material phenomenon, as a cultural practice, as a political metaphor. 

Voices travers material and symbolic barriers between different times and spaces. Trying to follow these paths requires an unceasing movement through different fields of expertise and action, social realities, and medial contexts. Usually, it also leads to a relational encounter with the Others.

So voices embody and (re-)present multiple pasts. They touch listening bodies in the social theater to claim for something that has been, that isn’t otherwise accessible any more. 

The historian Carlo Ginzburg writes that the idea of a narrative probably originated in a hunting society, from the experience of interpreting tracks. I like to think of these hungry hunters staring at the footprints of the beast, trying to figure out how to tell the others about them. I like it because it places vocality, as a bodily need, on the edge of narrating.

Then there are those spaces in which durable traces of the past are organized and stored by some form of writing. Books, archives, cemeteries, brains...the spaces of this unstable list don’t seem to be silent. Voices inhabit or chase them as sonic metaphors (the voice of the author), hallucinations (hearing voices when no one’s there) or figures of social injustice (the voice of the subaltern). So it’s not about putting orality against writing, but rather about embracing the openess inherent to the murmuring of songs, as well as the profound entanglements with technologies and environments upon which human experience relies.

I conceive of research as an act of situated, engaged and creative participation of the researchers in the realities they study, and of taking responsibility for the constructive and narrative nature of their accounts. In this regard, I see filmmaking as a way to engage in new relations with the world around me, to create filmic bodies in which different voices and environments can resonate, and to make alternative modes of perception possible.

Sometimes I improvise at the piano to accompany the projection of silent movies.