Silvia Rosi uses the photographic medium and moving images, combined with text, to explore the space of memory and of (self) representation. Her self-portraits and staged photography are deeply rooted in the tradition of West African studio portraiture, blending autobiography with broader historical and social narratives.
Dinsintegrata is part of the artist’s broader project: an extensive community-building operation aimed at creating a network of Afro-Italian citizens and forming a family archive of the African diaspora in Italy, to explore new ways of passing on visual knowledge through vernacular images. These photos perform complex social functions for both their subjects and their viewers, becoming a means of affirming or addressing questions of personal identity, family ties, gender identification, class status, national affiliation or membership in a community, sometimes obedience to social norms, sometimes in contrast with them.

Through 20 new photographic works, several moving images, and a selection of archival photographs collected by the artist in Italy—primarily in Emilia-Romagna—between 2023 and 2024, Rosi has traveled the country to gather hundreds of ordinary photographs, snapshots from family albums that recount the daily lives of those who, having arrived from Africa before the year 2000, portrayed themselves and their lives in diverse contexts.

Disintegrata humorously recounts and reimagines the idea of ​​"Italianness" in our contemporary landscape, exploring various creative spaces, from the family album as an intimate place of emergence from the past to the landscape inhabited by black bodies.

Published on the occasion of the 2024 first institutional solo exhibition in Italy, hosted by Collezione Maramotti during the 19th edition of the Fotografia Europea festival.