Biography

Caterina Borelli is an artist and filmmaker. She places her practice at the conjunction of anthropology, history and media and uses the built environment to unfold social and cultural issues. With “Asmara, Eritrea” (2009) she started to focus on the relation between memory and place.  In 2021 she published "Memoria necessaria," an artist’s book about twelve sites of colonial memory in Rome. She is the director of MoroRoma, an image collection that covers political and social events from the beginning of the XIX century to 1950. She received fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation (2023), the Rockefeller Bellagio Center (2014) and in the spring of 2025 she was a consultant for the Real Academia de España en Roma

Project Summary

Motel Africa is a feature documentary about the motel that the Italian energy company AGIP built in downtown Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1964. It will unravel the history of the influence that oil infrastructure and architecture had on a post-independence African nation and how it came to embody modernity. The project focuses on how the company presented itself to enter the African markets. In an almost trans-literation - sometimes just substituting a white model for an African – they made calendars, short films and advertising campaigns that mirrored what they produced earlier for Italy. Was the company’s vision of the African market equal to that of Italy’s? How did this image of modernity exported from Italy was perceived by post-independence Tanzania? How did it influence this Indian Ocean-East African nation with its multicultural African, Indian and Arabian communities? Borelli has completed the research phase for this project and compiled hours of interviews and archival materials - still images, drawings, advertisements, architectural plans - and is now finalizing the script and creating a plan for production.