Do-li-na

Rooted in my grandmother’s silenced Slovenian heritage, Do-li-na explores Italy’s borderlands through large-format photography, archives, and nocturnal cameras, questioning how images shape memory, power, and belonging.

Do-li-na is a visual research on how images shape memory and identity in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a borderland where Italian, Slovenian, Friulian, and German cultures and languages coexist.

The project began with a personal discovery: only after my grandmother’s death did I learn of her long-concealed Slovenian heritage, alongside documents from fascist Italianization policies—especially those connected to the 1923 school reform—that systematically sought to erase minority identities. What first appeared as a private silence revealed itself as part of a wider historical repression, opening a space to investigate how cultural memory is suppressed, transmitted, and remade.

Working with both personal and institutional archives, Do-li-na questions how histories are remembered, reshaped, or forgotten, and what role photography plays in these processes. Images are approached not as neutral evidence, but as instruments that produce meaning and authority. In the archive, presence and absence are equally charged: what is missing, cropped, or withheld can speak as forcefully as what is preserved.

The title refers to the dolina: not only a karst depression, but also a secluded mountain basin that shelters remote communities. In this geography of margins, oral tradition and everyday practices of belonging often carry knowledge that official history fails to hold. Do-li-na treats the margin as a space of possibility—where dominant narratives fracture and other forms of memory can emerge.

At the heart of the work are oral narratives and popular mythologies: fragments of animist, pagan, and Catholic traditions that persist in the region’s collective imagination. These stories become tools for rereading history critically, revealing how cultural knowledge endures in subtle and often overlooked forms. In the forests of Val Canale, Val Resia, and Val Natisone, these layers of memory surface through the presence of animals, whose movements resist interpretation and unsettle the boundary between the visible and the unseen.

Formally, I challenge documentary conventions by combining large-format landscape photographs, archival reproductions, and nocturnal video recordings. These elements are placed in dialogue with historical documents and oral testimonies, building a polyphonic structure that resists a single authoritative viewpoint. In collaboration with the Guardia Forestale, I installed nocturnal cameras in restricted mountain areas at 2,200 meters, in the Three Borders region where Italy, Austria, and Slovenia converge. Rather than confirming familiar symbols, the recordings reveal lives unfolding beyond our narratives—motion without story, presence without explanation.

Do-li-na positions photography as a site of tension between construction and omission, reality and imagination. It interrogates the medium’s historical claim to truth and foregrounds the ethical responsibilities embedded in every act of looking. Ultimately, the project challenges dominant ideas of landscape, belonging, and national identity, exploring what persists in the margins—quietly but powerfully—in the spaces between comprehension and mystery, and in the memories that resist erasure.