Book Launch | Boggiano Heirs by Cristiano Berti
+ Conversation between Cristiano Berti and Sheila Ramirez
June 4th 2025 | 6pm
Rua Damasceno Monteiro 12 r/c, 1170-112 Lisboa
Talk in English
3rd floor, access by stairs
Free Entry
Boggiano Heirs (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2023) is a unique exploration of one merchant’s legacy on the descendants of his slaves – and more broadly, an interrogation of Italy’s pro-slavery past. The result of five years of research, it is primarily an artist’s book, but takes the form of a historical essay.
Using an array of sources, Berti weaves together the stories of Antonio Boggiano and the people he owned as slaves either as house servants or on his coffee plantation. Uniting everything is the surname, imposed on the slaves and still widespread in the Afro-Cuban community.
The book is part of the Futile Cycles series, a group of hybrid works in which the author discovers affinities and distances between historical and artistic research.
The Futile Cycles: Boggiano project also includes two other works developed by the artist: a wall installation depicting two large family trees, in which the people born in Africa stand at the apex, and a video in which some stories collected by the author in the area where Antonio Boggiano’s coffee plantation once stood intersect with the conversation a family of Afro-Cuban Boggianos.
Cristiano Berti (Turin, 1967) is an interdisciplinary visual artist, researcher, and teacher based in Jesi (Italy). His most recent research-oriented art projects mainly deal with issues of migration and discrimination, sex work, crime, magic, contentious heritages and, more generally, with the phenomenologies of the past. He teaches at the Academy of Arts of Macerata.
Sheila Ramirez is a Cuban-Angolan designer and researcher exploring ancestral cosmologies through archives and musicalities from Africa and the Caribbean.