Non si vede la stessa cosa quando si sente;
non si sente la stessa cosa quando si vede.
(Michel Chion)

Memoria Esterna is an atypical video portrait of Milan. An unpredictable archive of the city’s geography, its history, and the emotional relationships between places and those who have lived in them or even just passed through them. Born from fragments of stories collected by ZimmerFrei, the collective author of the project, the work uses storytelling as a link between personal history and collective history, exploring the proximity or distance between oral evocation and visualization of places, between sound and image.

Memoria Esterna triggers a potentially infinite process, built from the continuous alternation of fullness and emptiness, almost like a mosaic missing some pieces, capable of creating a mechanism of expectation and its own betrayal.

Numerous collaborations have been activated by the project: from the people involved in the research to those who told the stories, from those who participated in the technical realization of the video to the artists selected by the Archivio C/O Careof & Viafarini, Meris Angioletti and Cecilia Pirovano, who followed the shooting phase and produced the behind-the-scenes photographs.

Within the framework of the project, two moments of “expansion” of the work itself were created.

In the first, held at La Triennale di Milano (May 12, 2007), the artists shared with the public the materials and the creative process of Memoria Esterna.
In the second, from October 23 to 25, 2007, Careof and ZimmerFrei organized a workshop open to 8 people from diverse backgrounds — art, architecture, communication — with the goal of immersing participants firsthand into the dimension of storytelling, while simultaneously analyzing the dynamics of constructing a project like Memoria Esterna.
The workshop participants included Luciana Andreani, Paolo dell’Acqua, Gianluca D’Apuzzo, Antonietta Foschini, Alessandra Giannandrea, Sabina Grasso, Alberto Guidato, and Claudia Maina.

Memoria Esterna (2007) is the first event of Ritratti. Percorsi video a Milano, a series of video productions by Careof curated by Chiara Agnello about the City of Milan, commissioned to Italian and international artists. Memoria Esterna was created in collaboration with the Provincia di Milano and premiered at La Triennale di Milano on the occasion of inCONTEMPORORANEA la rete dell'arte - Numero Uno (May 11-12-13, 2007).

On display at Careof (October 31 – November 24, 2007) are the video Memoria Esterna, the full interviews from which the story fragments were extracted, photos taken during the shoot, and the sound stories created by the participants in the workshop.