THE ALBUM & THE OTHER ALBUM

Dual publication: album replica + critical essay.

In the November of 1936, my maternal grandfather returned from East Africa after having spent overseas almost two years. There he had been fighting in the second Italo-Ethiopian war as a member of the voluntary black shirt militia on behalf of the regime of Benito Mussolini.

When he died, he left behind an album of photographs documenting his participation in the colonial war. As an object, the album is a stricking creation, a kind of mythical space where cultural bias and personal vision coexist and intertwine; yet none of those close to grandfather attempted to understand what its contents meant, unknowingly bestowing upon it a totemic aura that, not differently from that of a religious relic, survived its creator. For almost eighty years the album was thus captive to its ambiguities and unable to tell its story.

After in 2018 I acquired the album from my family, I endeavored to finally dissect it. If on the one hand as someone who grew up within the sphere of its influence I recognized its slippery nature, its being both familiar and unknowable, on the other as an artist I wished to disrupt its aura and finally give it a voice.


In the process of analyzing the album and writing on it a critical essay, I realized there was more to the story of the photographs than what met the eye.  

Questions raised by researching the album of photographs became the foundation for The Banquet and The Silent Ray.