Giulio Squillacciotti

What Has Left Since We Left is the work of filmmaker Giulio Squillacciotti. Created during the migration crises in Eastern Europe, the Brexit debates and the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the film presents a borderline scenario on the disintegration of the European Union in a hypothetical near future. The last three remaining countries – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – all played by the same actress, meet in the meeting room of the Province of Limburg Palace in Maastricht, where the eponymous treaty and founding text of the European Union was signed in 1992. The three characters are helped by the English interpreter to expose their personal feelings and vicissitudes as if in a group psychotherapy session, and through monologues that allegorically evoke problems and crises shaking the Union, they expose a kind of political unconscious. Through a journey that is as much historical as psychological, Squillacciotti seeks a way to overcome the impasse of the identity crisis and existential search for meaning, analysing alternatives and scenarios for a political project that shows the limits of its possibilities in the face of the great challenges of contemporaneity.

Giulio Squillacciotti (1982, Rome, Italy), lives and works in Milan and Maastricht. In his videos, Squillacciotti investigates possible divergent narratives by recounting real events mixed with fiction; based on a historical-anthropological matrix, he opens the narrative to different developments and contexts. His investigations revisit historical facts from a subjective point of view through speculative storytelling.
He participated at the artist residency of the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2018–19; in 2019 he won the Italian Council call and produced the work What Has Left Since We Left. Recent exhibitions include his solo shows at Fondazione Baruchello, Rome (2021); Careof, Milan (2021); GAMeC, Bergamo (2021); Spazio Cordis, Verona (2020). He participated in the Dutch pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale Architettura (2018). He teaches at NABA, Milan.