The Project
This site serves as a living archive and online fictional journal to imagine and mediate Antonio Cini's migrant journey that emerged from a research project at the University of South Australia in 2020. Historical documents and archival material (analogue and digitised) were gathered together through a process of drawing, music and digital montage to tell his story.
Historical documents, council records, police reports, newspaper articles, interviews, oral recordings, old photographs and other related archival material formed the basis of the text and images to imaginatively interpret Antonio's story. Interviews and eyewitness accounts by journalists during the Great Depression years in South Australia were used to construct narratives, images and music to re-envisage Antonio's personal experience of living on the banks of the Torrens River from 1930 to 1938.
The main aim of this project was to explore creative strategies to lift social stories and layered histories of human experience out of the recesses of archives and digitised repositories that have become displaced over time. Using Antonio's story as the catalyst for the project, it examined an intimate and creative process to utilise the same digital technology to discover and make new connections to real human experience that centres on themes of home, identity and migration.
In essence, this project seeks a mode of storytelling to explore the past that embodies an excavation of the self in the present.
Historical documents, council records, police reports, newspaper articles, interviews, oral recordings, old photographs and other related archival material formed the basis of the text and images to imaginatively interpret Antonio's story. Interviews and eyewitness accounts by journalists during the Great Depression years in South Australia were used to construct narratives, images and music to re-envisage Antonio's personal experience of living on the banks of the Torrens River from 1930 to 1938.
The main aim of this project was to explore creative strategies to lift social stories and layered histories of human experience out of the recesses of archives and digitised repositories that have become displaced over time. Using Antonio's story as the catalyst for the project, it examined an intimate and creative process to utilise the same digital technology to discover and make new connections to real human experience that centres on themes of home, identity and migration.
In essence, this project seeks a mode of storytelling to explore the past that embodies an excavation of the self in the present.