Milan World City. # 1 – Eritrea/Ethiopia

The World City Forum (Forum della Città Mondo) celebrates the inauguration of the MUDEC with a photographic project by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos dedicated to Milan’s Eritrean-Ethiopian community.

The exhibit is conceived as the first step of a broader project that wants to give voice to Milan’s various international communities, retracing the rise and development of each one and documenting their specific dynamics of integration and citizenship. The first “chapter” of this narration focuses the Eritrean-Ethiopian community, which has been contributing to Milan’s social and cultural fabric for at least fifty years. In 2016, the focus will be on the Chinese community.

Alan Maglio has spent over two years working with the World City Forum on the theme of migrant communities and their photographic representation. In collaboration with Medhin Paolos, he has done extensive research on Milan’s Eritrean community, collecting interviews and oral accounts and conducting archival research of photographic and audio-visual documents in various public and private institutions.

Milan World City. # 1 – Eritrea/Ethiopia sets Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos’ s photographic project on Milan’s contemporary Eritrean/Ethiopian community in conversation with two other “threads” of ethnographic narration. On one hand, it converses with objects, documents, and first-hand accounts from the City of Milan collections that cover the period of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa. On the other, it is juxtaposed to photographs from the early 1980s by Vito Scifo and Lalla Golderer, published in the 1985 volumeStranieri a Milano (Foreigners in Milan), that today belong to the Ethnographic and Social History Archive of the Region of Lombardy.

Maglio and Paolos also drew on Scifo and Golderer’s 1980s research in the making of Asmarina. The docu-film was presented in the last edition of Milan’s African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival and will be shown again for the whole duration of the MUDEC exhibit.