In Hamlet in Harar two stories are mixed together. The bloody Italian fascist campaign in Ethiopia, and the story of my grandfather, Hamlet, who emigrated to Harar as a settler. Both of the stories are shrouded in silence. Mixing images from family albums, with photos found in newspapers from the fascist period, I try to bring out of oblivion an uncomfortable history that Italy is trying to remove by omitting its responsibilities and my family by simply not talking about that.

My stay in Brazil helped me to decrypt memories about colonial history. A history that, like that of Ethiopia, led to the domination and elimination of cultures and lives. A violence that leaves deep wounds in the colonized, and crossed the lives of the colonizers too. Sometimes they realize that in the midst of so much blood there is no conquest, but death. A few years after his return from Ethiopia, my grandfather decided to give up his life, and I read this extreme gesture as a way of also putting an end to a story of rape.

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Hamlet in Harar has been ashown at Galeria ICG and at the Europian Photography Festival 2017/ Circuit off

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