Una storia italiana
Starting from the trial of former Italian president Berlusconi, the project examines the figure of Italian-Moroccan model and aspiring sports journalist Imane Fadil. Attending the ex-president’s parties, she was a key witness, confessing abuse of power and underage prostitution at his residence in Arcore, near Milan. In 2019, she died at 34, weeks after announcing her upcoming book.
Berlusconi reduced the representation of women in Italy to few pixels. The project manipulates “photographic leftovers”, archive pictures that Imane took from her phone and documentary pictures the photographer took at Imane’s Milan house with AI, aiming to recreate missing images that Fadil shared in court, and for which no visual evidence exists.
Deconstructing An italian story, a propaganda zine of the ex-president, to reconstruct another “Italian story”, a collective memory from the rubble of the “failed Me Too” (2010-2023).
Project in the frame of Giovane Fotografia Italiana #13 – VOCI / VOICES
BIO
Eva Rivas Bao
Eva Rivas Bao (b. 2001, Milan, IT) is an Italian-Argentinian photographer whose work merges documentary photograph with digital manipulation. She earned a BA in New Technologies of Art from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera while working with the studio and archive of fashion photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri. She completed the Master’s program in Photography at ECAL in Lausanne in 2025.
Her work originates from a direct and initially simple documentary framework, but everything is subjected to a process of manipulation through massive post-production, destroyed and recomposed in the form of an hybrid between reality and simulation, between amateur gesture and the codes of pop culture, where ‘poor images’ function as a key empowering element within the work. In her projects she addresses the question of identity and the contemporary perception of women in Italy and in Europe, and the manipulation of them by the mass media in the last 30 years.
Her project “An Italian Story” has been presented at Fotodoks in Munich (2025), featured by Photoworks UK in Photography+ Emerging Talents (2025) and shortlisted for Kassel Dummy Awards 2025.