A MEMORY OF SOMETHING THAT NEVER EXISTED

29:09 Min – 2025 (CH)
Direction: Elias Bötticher

Migrating birds flicker above the rooftops of Rome. Longing for a city of lights, Fadri wanders through distant memory spaces. The lights of a Sicilian oil refinery cast dark shadows over people’s dwellings, all while fleeting moments offer hope - even when the water seems to be growing murky everywhere else.


COMMENTARY: 

This work emerges in a present where democratic structures fracture, where authoritarian thinking gains traction, where foundational assumptions prove unstable. What began as documentary research into a Sicilian refinery processing Russian crude was irrevocably altered by personal rupture. The observational premise collapsed. What remains is an investigation of power made visible: how industrial landscapes serve as built records of extraction, dependency, control – steel and concrete holding the tensions that course through geopolitical space.