While Asleep, While Awake

While Asleep, While Awake, is the second chapter of the project La Ripetizione (Repetition), which started in 2020. The project incorporates images and texts from books, manuals, and documentary films, which I collected and found to create mixed media compositions and to retrace moments of working women's life and education, combining elements of fiction with historical and public documents on women’s labor until the early 1980s. I use archives and existing materials with the political goal of highlighting hidden aspects of cultural history and its patterns, with the intent to expose possible ways to reread history, social patterns, and routines, as well as investigate how memory works and the way it can assemble unconscious inventions and fictions. With the same approach, I’m now also experimenting with the bias and limits of open-source AI text-to-image applications. All these documents, digital and physical, allow me to create a larger body of work, now included and an integral part of While Asleep, While Awake. Concentrating my research on the relationship between action and rest, work, and sleep, I am experimenting with audiovisual fragments from several international archives, designing a series of video portraits that dilate the time of a working shift and the gaze of women at work. In parallel, I'm creating an installation piece with images generated with open-source AI text-to-image applications. Intrigued by the possibility of assembling images of a specific condition or moment of the past, these applications visualize fictional memories and documents. In particular, I'm composing images of working women in factories while trying to challenge the machine bias and reflecting on memory with the usage of digital collages and the relationship between texts and images in our contemporary tools and languages.