JCU Communications Professors Participate in International Journalism Festival
On April 12, JCU Communications professors Donatella Della Ratta and Marco Ferrari participated in the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.
Professor Donatella Della Ratta
Professor Della Ratta took part in “What’s Left of the Syrian Revolution?” The session featured Noura Ghazi Safadi, human rights lawyer, and widow of Bassel Khartabil Safadi, an information engineer and activist and one of the fathers of the Syrian revolution, who was executed by the Syrian regime in 2015.
Professor Ferrari then joined Professor Della Ratta in “The Vanished Image. Voice-video-sound improvisation on the archives of the peaceful revolution, Syria 2011.” The performance is a lyrical and poetic journey through the forgotten archives of the peaceful phase of the Syrian revolution. In particular, the personal archive of the pacifist activist Bassel Khartabil Safadi, who died in 2015 in a Syrian prison, offers the opportunity for a journey of speech, sound, and music inside the repressed 2011, a year that saw peoples rebel against injustice and exploitation.
Professor Marco Ferrari
The performance is a tribute to pacifist activists, and in particular to citizens who, armed with a video camera or smartphone, documented at great personal risk protests, sit-ins, and actions of civil disobedience in Syria throughout 2011; images which were removed or deleted from social media, ignored by mainstream media, and which marked a phase in history that risks being forgotten. To these “images in spite of everything”, as the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman called them, the performance brings attention. With: Donatella Della Ratta, Marco G. Ferrari, Ludovica Manzo, Igor Legari, Luca Venitucci, Renato Fiorito.
Professors Della Ratta and Ferrari also brought “The Vanished Image” to the ex-Asilo Filangieri in Naples. Professor Della Ratta also gave a lecture at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” entitled “Shooting a revolution, Visual Media and Warfare in Syria.”
