Cinema Impero

Cinema Impero takes its name from the namesake movie theatre located in downtown Asmara, built in 1937 under the fascist regime. Cinema, as a language, has always held the power to both generate imagery and shape narratives—particularly in its most propagandistic and state-driven dimension. In light of today’s artificial intelligences, it is clear how these new forms of language also aim, in part, to shock and simultaneously distort reality.
Cinema Impero is a metanarrative that interweaves multiple space-time layers and linguistic registers: video materials drawn from the historical archive of Istituto Luce and from the artist’s personal archive, narrated and interpreted by two voices and two intelligences – one artificial, the other emotional.
Cinema Impero is a black box: a device that encapsulates cinematic language, theatrical language, and the algorithmic language of AI. Within this multi-sensory apparatus, conceived for one viewer at a time, the individual is placed at the heart of macro-narratives and invited to drift toward a warm proximity: a space of intimate otherness between narrator and listener.