FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary
documentary photography
FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary documentary photography

Eva Rivas Bao

An Italian Story, 2025

An Italian Story examines the life and unresolved death of aspiring sports journalist Imane Fadil (1984 – 2019), who testified in court about the so-called Ruby affair as a key witness in the trial of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for abuse of office. Fadil died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty-four shortly after announcing the forthcoming publication of a book she was writing about the abuse of power and the exploitation of women, some of them underage, in Berlusconi’s milieu. Five years later, artist Eva Rivas Bao has deconstructed the distorted reporting and instrumentalisation of Fadil in the sensationalist and speculative coverage by the Italian mass media. Bringing together material from Fadil’s private archive and her own documentary photographs, Rivas Bao has created an AI-based series of photomontages from the Berlusconi media era that look like images from a fevered dream. An Italian Story is thus intended not so much as an authentic reconstruction of the past as a feminist reversal of precisely the photographic logic that has informed the collective visual memory of Fadil to date.

 

Eva Rivas Bao

An Italian Story, 2025

An Italian Story examines the life and unresolved death of aspiring sports journalist Imane Fadil (1984 – 2019), who testified in court about the so-called Ruby affair as a key witness in the trial of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for abuse of office. Fadil died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty-four shortly after announcing the forthcoming publication of a book she was writing about the abuse of power and the exploitation of women, some of them underage, in Berlusconi’s milieu. Five years later, artist Eva Rivas Bao has deconstructed the distorted reporting and instrumentalisation of Fadil in the sensationalist and speculative coverage by the Italian mass media. Bringing together material from Fadil’s private archive and her own documentary photographs, Rivas Bao has created an AI-based series of photomontages from the Berlusconi media era that look like images from a fevered dream. An Italian Story is thus intended not so much as an authentic reconstruction of the past as a feminist reversal of precisely the photographic logic that has informed the collective visual memory of Fadil to date.