Eva Rivas Bao reconstructs Italy's failed #MeToo from within the Berlusconi era mediascape

Eva Rivas Bao discusses her work exposing the violence faced by Imane Fadil during the Berlusconi era

Images that circulate widely on social media play a decisive role in shaping how social and political realities are produced, perceived, and contested. Far from being neutral, these images contribute to the formation of cultural and territorial identities, reinforcing dominant narratives while also holding the potential to disrupt, reframe, and resist them.

Within this context, Der Greif “Local Voices” continues to foreground situated perspectives and collaborative authorship as a way of slowing down image circulation and re-embedding images within their social, cultural, and political conditions. Through an ongoing exercise in co-writing, the project examines how visual practices can counter homogenizing narratives and support more plural, democratic forms of representation by insisting on specificity, locality, and dialogue, foregrounding situated knowledge over dominant or centralized narratives.

In conversation with Eva Rivas Bao, this month we delve into the Italian visual culture of media language shaped by Berlusconi’s Mediaset: a hyper-saturated, commercial landscape that engineered a specific, highly political representation of the body. In her project “Una storia italiana,” Rivas Bao subverts this historic media monopoly by stepping directly into its aesthetic arena. Using generative AI as a forensic tool, she reconstructs the missing visual archive of the trials, translating the late Imane Fadil’s courtroom testimonies into raw, intentionally flawed imagery. By hacking the very language of overproduction and distortion that once insulated Italian soft power, Rivas Bao fills the historical gaps of a failed local #MeToo reclaiming the narrative from decades of systemic victim-blaming and turning the aesthetic of the "pop spectacle" against itself.

Rivas Bao is an Italian-Argentinian photographer born in Milan, whose work merges documentary photography with digital manipulation. She holds 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 thirty years.

Ilaria Sponda: The Berlusconi era imposed a specific visual hegemony in Italy, characterized by color saturation, commercial television aesthetics, and a precise representation of the body. In what way does your project reinterpret these codes through artificial intelligence in order to reveal their mechanisms of power?

Eva Rivas Bao: I used fiction to reconstruct the gaps. AI served as a tool that allowed me to take control of the Berlusconian visual language and reclaim it by prompting scenes based on what Fadil had declared in court, despite the absence of any visual evidence. I believe photography has always been a medium capable both of controlling reality and of losing control over it at the same time. I am interested in the relationship between these two extremes, especially within the Italian context, where political television programs can sometimes contain more fiction than fictional films themselves. In my practice, I have been strongly inspired by Hannah Höch’s approach on photomontages. Beginning in the 1920s, she collected photographs from fashion magazines and reassembled them into Dadaist satirical photomontages in Berlin. In “Una storia italiana,” (translatable into “An Italian Story”) I employed a similar technique, but through AI and post production. I therefore use AI as a tool rather than as the subject of the project itself.

IS: In what way does the abstraction or distortion produced through AI help you reveal what remained invisible or erased within the official narrative of Italy in the 1990s and 2000s?

ERB: The distortion and abstraction in my AI images are highly constructed; they are not generated by AI itself, which by nature tends to produce hyper-realistic and well-composed images. I deliberately built these photographs to look ‘poor’ . In the images depicting the abusive parties at the former president’s house, I meticulously composed the error itself, training the AI to generate ugly, out-of-focus photographs, or adding flash deliberately. Error gives the story a sense of truth and forensic quality. I exploited the potential embedded in imperfection and in the amateur gesture. Berlusconi used the media as an instrument of soft power. His censorship was not only ‘classical’ – through corruption and the elimination of evidence – but also operated through the saturation and overproduction of images, which made objective facts difficult to verify. He manipulated the image and identity of Imane Fadil and many other women, portraying them as unstable and constructing an entirely fabricated imaginary around them, based on sexist and racist stereotypes that he himself had cultivated through his media empire over previous decades. Yet what Fadil stated so courageously in court still exists and remains accessible on YouTube. That is where I began. Artificial intelligence became a tool through which I attempted to make visible what Fadil testified to in court over the course of nine years, before her death in 2019 and prior to Berlusconi’s acquittal in 2023. For example, it allowed me to ‘hack’ Villa San Martino by inserting into the exact locations the scenes described by Fadil, or by reintroducing the Priapus statuette that the president allegedly made the young women at the table touch in turn.

It also became a form of collaboration with Fadil herself. Having gained access to her photographic archive, I was able to create photomontages using some of her own images in dialogue with my research – for instance, the photograph in front of Villa San Martino featuring Fadil’s shadow, where the foreground image is hers and the background photograph was taken by me.

IS: How do you manage to balance the visual appeal of that pop aesthetic with the need to produce a democratic and pluralistic representation that challenges those very roots? And what is your personal relationship to that aesthetic and social legacy?

ERB: Imane Fadil and many other women were destroyed by a media construct, and therefore the only way I felt I could deconstruct that language was by using the very same language that destroyed them/us. The idea for the project emerged after a long period of research in Imane’s home, where she lived with her best friend, and after he told me who Fadil really was behind the entire media construction. After seeing and photographing her books and personal objects, meeting her dog, Mia, who now lives with her best friend, and seeing the box in her room containing her clothes, I began to ask myself: what remains after all this failure? I was not interested in keeping the photographs purely documentary, but in doing something beyond that, beginning with carrying forward the legacy that Fadil herself had started through her words.

I began this project when I was 22 years old, and I am often asked why Berlusconism matters to me, given that I only experienced the very end of it. I believe the answer is already contained within the question itself: my generation is the result of the Berlusconi era. Just as the generations shaped by fascism had to confront that past – by remembering and archiving it so that it would not happen again – I believe the same should happen with the Berlusconi era, albeit in a different historical and political context. So as a feminist, and above all as a photographer, I felt an urgency to make this project. I balanced the visual seduction of pop aesthetics with the story narrated by Fadil, which is far less seductive and instead deeply distressing. I am interested in drawing in viewers who believe they are looking at a ‘Berlusconian’ image and automatically expect to laugh – whether at him or with him – only to then realize, once they understand the content, that ultimately it is not funny at all. Film theorist Laura Mulvey writes about how the transition to the digital era was fundamental for feminism: the possibility of freezing moving images made it possible to observe and analyze them more deeply. What I did was freeze them, copy them, paste them, cut them apart, recombine them, and print them in the form of a book or exhibition that gives “Una storia italiana” a more official status, something to be taken more seriously. In a certain sense, I also draw from Legacy Russell’s theory of “Glitch Feminism”: revealing the medium itself and re-presenting it by using errors and glitches as forms of empowerment.

IS: Are there specifically Italian terms or concepts – such as ‘trasformismo’ or ‘velinismo’ – that you tried to ‘translate’ into visual prompts?

ERB: In my project, I translated only through Fadil’s own vocabulary – for example, Berlusconi groping young girls, or him falling asleep during his parties because of his age. The only expression I retained was “papi girl” – the way many of the girls used to call him – but within this context, it takes on a far more disturbing meaning. I am not interested in reproducing the ‘ironic’ language created by his own mass media, such as “bunga bunga” or “elegant dinners.” Those dinners were not elegant at all; they were spaces of sexual abuse and underage prostitution. Personally, I never use the term “bunga bunga” because otherwise it feels as though Berlusconi is still winning through his soft power. More broadly, I believe the language itself needs to be corrected, simply by looking again at recent Italian history for what it really was: a collective failure in which the entire country, from right to left, seemed united in only one thing – victim blaming and media violence against the women involved in the trial. Imane Fadil, for example, instead of being protected and praised for her extraordinary courage, was devoured by the media system and isolated for nine long years before dying in 2019, under highly mysterious circumstances, within three weeks of announcing that she had written a book about the parties. It is also important to remember that even today Italy continues to victim-blame a woman who was, at the time, a seventeen-year-old girl: Karima El-Mahroug (and certainly not “Ruby Rubacuori”). She was only seventeen, yet newspapers exposed her face publicly without protecting her privacy. Finally, if I had to choose one prompt that I used repeatedly, it would be: “adolescents dressed as adult women.” 

IS: What kind of reception has your project received within the Italian context?

ERB: At first, I thought the project would not receive much attention in Italy, because we tend to want to forget our failures – especially the Berlusconi era, which seems as though it never truly ends. Instead, I encountered a great deal of interest from all kinds of people, especially women. There is a strong desire to understand and to emerge from the confusion, as well as a curiosity to discover the figure of Imane Fadil more deeply. I also did not expect to receive attention from public institutions, yet I was selected as a finalist for the Luigi Ghirri Prize in Reggio Emilia, which gave the project significant visibility. From June 11, I will also exhibit as a finalist for the Premio Mila by Fondazione Malerba at Careof in Milan. Exhibiting specifically in Milan, where so much of this history has developed, feels particularly meaningful. Of course, I have also faced rejections. The reason, I believe, is that speaking about the figure of Imane Fadil is still difficult in Italy. There is always a tendency to avoid taking risks during these times, even within the art scene. Sometimes even people who oppose Berlusconi prefer not to speak about him, in order to avoid “giving him space” again, but to me this does not make any sense at all, also because my project is about Imane Fadil and not Silvio Berlusconi. Yet Berlusconi, despite being dead, continues to be used in political campaigns as if he were still alive, which is, in itself, a very interesting phenomenon.

IS: The book version of “Una storia italiana” echoes the format of Berlusconi’s magazine “Una storia italiana,” which also inspired the title of your project. Could you elaborate on this aspect?

ERB: The project was initially conceived as a book during Bruno Ceschel’s course in the Photography Master’s program at ECAL. Together with him and the other great professors, it was certainly a very stimulating environment in which to understand how to think about images, what to do with them and why. From the beginning, my intention was always to create something official – a book that could also function as a physical document, capable in some way of seriously archiving what had happened. Recently, I was very happy that, during the opening days of Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, the new photobook published by Skinnerboox was released. The title is yet another appropriation stolen from Berlusconi. “Una storia italiana” was a self-celebratory magazine that he mailed to every Italian household in 2001 before winning the elections for the second time. However, I reused the title to speak about another “Italian story”: the story of Imane Fadil and the Ruby trial.

IS: Imane Fadil described abuses and power dynamics in Arcore for which no photographic evidence exists. How would you define this new status of the image? How did you develop the AI training process to create these visual forms of evidence?

ERB: As for the photographs, I used AI in a very “craft-based” way, because I experimented with many different methods to construct the images through that technique. I created a dataset containing photographs with a Berlusconian aesthetic, onto which I later prompted Fadil’s own words. In other cases, I used simpler approaches such as image-to-image generation, or I would add only small elements – for example in the documentary photographs taken inside Fadil’s home. More generally, AI became a tool and a way of covering the ‘gaps’ and the absence of visual data within this story. The attempt to recreate “missing images” is something I had already encountered in Rithy Panh’s 2013 documentary The Missing Picture, in which he used clay figurine dioramas to visually reconstruct memories and atrocities from 1970s Cambodia that had never been documented by cameras. It felt important to archive this sort of failed Italian #MeToo, and the use of fiction to fill in the gaps became necessary in order to build a visual reconstruction. The 1990s philosopher Sadie Plant wrote about women and new technologies in “Zeros + ones: digital women + the new technoculture” (1997), and about how women were historically excluded from computing despite their foundational role in its development. She also wrote about ‘absences,’ ‘gaps,’ and ‘zeros,’ elements often historically symbolically associated with women as spaces that are actually fertile grounds for creativity. In a way, I think this project puts that idea into practice.