Territories

The recovered films form a varied corpus of images that take us back to Parma: its neighborhoods, streets, squares, and surrounding countryside. Still-living rituals (like the crickets in the Ducal Park or the market in Ghiaia) appear alongside others that have nearly disappeared (the circus in Cittadella, the San Giuseppe fair, traditional artisan workshops). There are strikes, protests, and struggles from the 1960s, new educational ideas such as those of teacher Ulisse Adorni using Super 8 film, and films made by students and families to capture places, faces, and fleeting moments. Other footage takes us into the Parma Apennines, through a still-recognizable landscape of outings and excursions. Female perspectives reflect a changing society, and stories emerge of bakers, mechanics, tram drivers, all united by a shared passion for amateur filmmaking. In this way, private memory becomes collective, reassembled into fragments that tell the story of Parma and its twentieth century.

In this series, we discover an intimate and personal perspective that traverses the homes, landscapes, customs, and traditions of San Marino. The project operates on multiple interpretative levels: on one hand, it offers a cultural and anthropological insight into Sammarinese society, its folklore, and its territory; on the other, it allows for direct engagement with people, following them in their daily routines, first steps, and moments of familial closeness. The images — many of them previously unseen even by Sammarinese themselves — open up a collective imagination that spans from the 1960s to the 1990s. In addition to offering glimpses of the historic center, Mount Titano, and its towers, the project also explores residential — and often less represented — areas in the castles of Dogana, Montegiardino, Borgo Maggiore, and others. Some sequences document the lives of Sammarinese families who emigrated to America, providing a valuable visual testimony between two worlds: the one of origin and the one of elsewhere.

Ci troviamo in provincia di Udine, in quella particolare fascia di territorio compreso tra due linee di demarcazione più o meno invisibili: a ovest il confine linguistico tra le lingue romanze e quelle slave, a est quello politico tra l’Italia e la Slovenia. Questo territorio prende il nome di Benečija, o Benecìa, termine sloveno che in passato indicava quei territori di lingua slovena che si trovavano però nei domini della Repubblica di Venezia. Essi in seguito hanno sempre seguito le sorti delle terre friulane, facendo parte della provincia del Friuli o di Udine all’interno di tutte le entità statali successive alla Repubblica veneta e anche in buona parte di quelle precedenti. Ciò vale non solo per gli avvenimenti politici ma anche per quelli naturali, come ad esempio la catastrofe del terremoto del 1976. Le immagini amatoriali di una terra martoriata da un sisma sono fondamentali per rintracciare l’antica vocazione rurale di paesi oggi quasi interamente costituiti da edifici prefabbricati o in cemento armato.