Films I made during my MA at Goldsmiths, from my first time behind a camera in Camberwell to a mosque on Brick Lane.
Memories of Brick Lane follows two men from the Bangladeshi community as they remember the street they have known for decades. Through their memories, the film sets a remembered Brick Lane against the changing street of the present, exploring how memory holds a community to a place as it transforms.
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This is an observational exercise for a video production assignment, in which I follow a hotel supervisor opening the breakfast restaurant and bar ahead of the guests' arrival.
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This is a multimodal photo and video essay in which, through the analysis of two films, I discuss the function of technology in everyday social life — in particular how it mediates the way people relate to their environment and to each other.
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This is my first video essay, in which I discuss the importance of reviewing and updating the ethnographic film canon in order to improve our understanding of the medium as visual anthropologists. To do so, I analyse two marginal films which, read together, allow for new readings and insights that have so far been overlooked.
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This video is the result of a research process for a video production assignment which required the use of archival footage. While looking for material I came across Cold War public service announcement footage and, by following the algorithm, eventually stumbled upon some interesting 1960s commercials. Struck by the conceptual and communicative similarities between the two formats, I decided to merge them together to highlight the affinity between propaganda material and advertising in an ironic way.
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This is the first video I have ever produced. It is the result of a sense of place assignment, in which I tried to capture the contradictory nature of Camberwell. Shot in the morning, I wanted to show a waking neighbourhood, by opening with its gentrified main street and areas and ending with its hidden and abandoned side.
Watch the filmEssays from my MA at Goldsmiths on diaspora, migration, belonging, images and media. Each one opens as a page here.
Memory, Place and the Construction of Identity
The written companion to my film. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Jan Assmann and Edward Casey, I look at how the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane holds its identity together through memory while the street changes around it, and how those ideas shaped the film's form.
Berlusconi and the Reinvention of Italian Hegemony
A reading of public images from the fall of Italy's First Republic to the Villa Certosa scandal. With Debord's spectacle and Strassler's image-event, I trace how Berlusconi made visibility itself the new form of power, and why exposure never undid him.
Globalising Processes and the Social Production of Popular Aesthetics
Why does a tourist find Venice beautiful before arriving, and why does a billboard make a Nairobi neighbourhood look lacking to the people who live there? With Bourdieu and Appadurai, I argue that globally circulated images teach people what to find beautiful.
Imagination, Technology and the Colonial Imaginary
From Stefania Pandolfo's Moroccan youth to Amitav Ghosh's 'technological unconscious', I follow how the imagination of leaving and of arriving is now shaped by platforms, and argue that this amounts to a new, technocolonial form of power.
An art film made at Goldsmiths. Bronco, a pigeon, sets out to escape the trappings of modern life on a journey towards enlightenment.
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I'm an Italian visual anthropologist and filmmaker based in London.
I studied sociology at the University of York, graduating with a First Class BA (Hons), before specialising in Visual Anthropology with an MA at Goldsmiths. My interests lie in diaspora, migration and identity, and more broadly in how people negotiate belonging and identity across different places and social worlds.
I'm also drawn to media: how screens, archives and advertising shape the way we see ourselves and each other.
