An Italian Story

The project reopens the unresolved death of Imane Fadil, key witness against Berlusconi. Archival images, Rivas Bao's photographs, digital collage and AI recreate the "missing images" she described, rebuilding feminist memory from "digital rubble".

In Una Storia Italiana, 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 underage 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.

Silvio Berlusconi ‘compressed’ the representation of women in Italy into just a few pixels.

The project therefore manipulates “what remains” of the Berlusconian era: archival materials and also personal documentary photographs taken by Rivas Bao in Imane Fadil’s home in Milan are combined with AI with the aim of recreating the “missing images” that Fadil described in court, for which no visual evidence exists.

The book deconstructs ‘An Italian Story’, the title of a propaganda magazine form 2001 once published by Berlusconi, and rebuilds another ‘italian story’. The result is a collective memory formed from digital rubble, shaped by a national failure to reckon with its own Me Too moment, lasting more than a decade (2010–2023).