An Italian Story

This project investigates the memory of model Imane Fadil, a key witness in the Berlusconi trial. After photographing her home and the places she lived,I re-composed her testimony using collage and AI-generated images, capturing her experience and legacy.

In An Italian Story, Eva Rivas Bao revisits the life and unresolved death of Imane Fadil, an Italian-Moroccan model and aspiring sports journalist who became a central witness in the trial against former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi. Fadil testified about the abuse of power and the exploitation of women that took place at Berlusconi’s private residence during the so-called Bunga Bunga parties. In 2019, shortly after announcing the publication of her book, she died in suspicious circumstances at the age of thirty-four.

The project draws on fragments of the Berlusconian era, particularly its hollowed-out representation of women. Using artificial intelligence, Rivas Bao manipulates archival materials and personal photographs taken at Fadil’s former home in Milan. She attempts to recreate the missing pictures Fadil claimed to have shared in court, images that never publicly surfaced. She deconstructs An Italian Story, the title of a propaganda magazine once published by Berlusconi, and rebuilds it into a counter-narrative. The result is a collective memory formed from digital rubble, shaped by a national failure to reckon with its own Me Too moment.

The project involves several photographic approaches together. I started with a documentary approach, meeting people close to Imane and taking photographs at her home, including her dog Mia, who remained in the care of her best friend. With these photos, I created digital collages using all the material I had: photos taken from the internet, Google Maps, italian TV, and I also generated AI images by describing places she had visited.

Imane Fadil's identity was heavily manipulated by the mass media, and in this book, I attempt to use the same medium to manipulate it again, but in her favor.