Design Map · Eindhoven
The Wretched of the Screen
Graduation project by Sasha Ricci Rovatti at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘The Wretched of the Screen’ revisits the legacy and contradictions of 20th-century Italian communist filmmakers to question how political images might still generate solidarity today. Inspired by the recent strikes for Palestine in Italy, and in dialogue with Valentino Orsini’s ‘I dannati della terra’ (‘The Wretched of the Earth’), it explores reenactment as a cinematic and political practice, examining the responsibilities and contradictions of engaging with anti-colonial struggles from historical and contemporary Western perspectives. Developed through archival research, fieldwork and in collaboration with the Audiovisual Archive of the Labour and Democratic Movement (IT), it combines historical footage, newly filmed material and text through editing strategies that treat the archive as an unfinished conversation rather than a finalised record. By revisiting the visual legacy of anti-colonial cinema, the piece asks who has the authority to represent liberation struggles while recovering the internationalist hope embedded within these histories.