GAMeC continues its participation in Artists’ Film International, the prestigious video art network established in 2008 by the Whitechapel Gallery and now curated by Forma. The initiative brings together this year twelve international contemporary art institutions, along with artists from around the world.
The 2026 edition of the program, A Kind of Power, brings together a selection of films that renegotiate the fraught legacies of representation and respond to the conditions under which people, histories, and territories are made visible.
Many of the artists move beyond critique alone, to explore how moving-image might create new forms of relation, attention, and collective presence. While some works confront contemporary systems of visibility directly, others propose alternative ways of inhabiting and understanding the world through ritual, memory, reciprocity, and acts of witnessing.
For this edition, GAMeC curators Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni have selected the film Sight Unseen (2019) by Italian artist Alessandra Ferrini (Florence, 1984).
It is based on the most complete–but legally unpublishable until 2021–series of images documenting Libyan anticolonial leader Omar al-Mukhtar’s capture, trial and state killing by Fascist Italy in 1931.
The voice and hands of historian Alessandro Volterra show and describe these images to the camera, although these are never fully revealed: barely discernible, they are faded to black, blurred, shown for just an instant.
Conveying the concealment and marginalisation of these images (and their legal ban), the film interweaves other documents and artefacts attesting to the carefully orchestrated politics of visibility and invisibility that shape the memory of colonial violence in Italy.
The film invites us to reflect on who has the right to see, who can be represented, and under what conditions. By turning the visual ban into a critical opportunity, Ferrini reflects on the role of photography within a colonial memory that has never been fully addressed, questioning how to reactivate these images of dominance without reproducing their violence.
It is precisely in this dimension of making the gaze accountable that the work finds its ideal place within Pedagogy of Hope: one of its central premises is that education should provide the tools to read the world critically and to recognize the power structures that shape its representations. Sight Unseen perfectly embodies this perspective, creating the conditions through which viewers can critically examine the mechanisms by which history is told, obscured, and forgotten.
Alessandra Ferrini herself will further develop these reflections on September 18 and 19 during two events designed to delve deeper into the path traced by the film: through a workshop at GAMeC and a performance-lecture at Performatorio, the artist will invite participants to investigate how Italy’s colonial legacy continues to condition our visual representations, our gaze, and the complex geopolitical dynamics of the Mediterranean.
Further information at this link.