Film Essays & Archival Collage
Katrina Lolicato works across Super 8, 16mm found footage, family archive, oral history and sound. Her practice takes the form of film essays and archival collage.
Her works stage theory in material form. Concepts such as structure and agency, projection, inheritance, commemoration and responsibility are tested through image, duration and edit rather than explained.
Fragments are reorganised. Editing remains visible. Gaps are not resolved.
Presented at SBS On Demand; Melbourne Documentary Film Festival; Multicultural Film Festival; People of Passion International Film Festival (ACMI); White Night Melbourne; Federation Square; Museo Italiano; City Library Melbourne; and 111CM (111 Community), Suwon, in partnership with the Suwon Cultural Foundation and the International Visual Sociology Association.
Recipient, Victorian Multicultural Commission Award for Excellence (2020).
Aussie Road to Bali (2026)
A Super 8 film essay re-organising holiday footage through intertitles. Ritual, labour and souvenir occupy the same frame. Tourism appears not as escape but as structure — sustained by distance and selective vision.
Sentire Part 1 (2025)
An audio-visual essay pairing Holy Thursday field recordings with deconstructed 16mm film. Cultural form appears as repetition and adaptation. Theory of assimilation and retention is not stated — it is held in rhythm and interruption.
Exhibited at 111CM (111 Community), Suwon Cultural Foundation in partnership with the International Visual Sociology Association.
Terramuri (2024)
A montage of NASA Gemini IV, a 1972 Australian expedition and 8mm family footage. Elemental imagery and ritual gesture consider inheritance on contested land. Responsibility emerges as negotiation rather than resolution.
The Garden (2024)
A digital collage responding to the threatened erasure of the Ballarat Orphanage site. Found holiday footage forms a memorial ground. Institutional forgetting is countered through assemblage.
The work tests commemoration as practice.
Adorata, ma mai annacata (2024)
A film essay in Sicilian language: an exchange between a grieving mother and her stillborn child. Voice and absence share the same frame. Grief persists beyond visibility.
Her, Grace (2022)
An archival film collage constructed from family footage and oral history. Black frames interrupt continuity. The edit counters nostalgia and exposes memory as constructed.
The migrant narrative is not affirmed. It is unsettled.
Building Blocks (2015)
Twenty seconds. Fixed materials. Public street. A direct test of structure and agency. Constraint and improvisation made visible.
Five Generations (2014)
Domestic archive assembled across five eras of policy and migration. Continuity and rupture share the frame. History is shown as lived condition, not backdrop.
Beyond the Lens: Tourist as Ethnographer (2014)
A film essay reframing tourism as projection. The act of looking becomes evidence of desire and confirmation.
Place Making (Arc Up Australia!)
Place Making/Community-Led Participatory Projects
2023 Talking Rubbish in Lalor (Podcast, local history, zine, exhibition), Funded by City of Whittlesea.
2020 Mano Nella Mano, Melbourne Victoria (podcast, emergency response) Funded through crowdfunding and Inner North Community Foundation, with support in kind from St Brigid’s Parish in Carlton.
2019 From This Place: Remembering and Forgetting in Ballarat, (podcast, Oral History, Local History, Difficult National Heritage, Stolen Generation), Funded by Public Records Office Victoria.
2018 International Melbourne (zine, exhibition), The George Paton Gallery, Funded by Melbourne University.
2015-17 The Good Room, Brunswick East (exhibition and community event place). Supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
2016 NOBS and SOBS: A snapshot of Brunswick and Fawkner (Zine, Community History), funded by City of Merri-Bek.
2015 (Con)Temporary Place, Fawner (place-making, event), funded by City of Merri-Bek.
Exhibitions
2025 Absolute Disorder, (exhibition) Suwon Cultural Foundation, South Korea, Sentire, An audio-visualization of the Italo- Australian everyday. Experimental Film Exhibition
2024 Windows Onto Hume, (digital story building, co-curator) City of Hume (tendered project). Co-tendered in collaboration with History at Work Consulting Historians. Permanent display
2016 Oral History Victoria Group Showcase (exhibition producer, curator and contributor), funded by Oral History Victoria.
2015 Italian-Australian: Creating Culture, Defining Diaspora (exhibition, oral history, digital storytelling),
Funded by CO.AS.IT Museo Italiano, Carlton.
Digital Stories and Podcasts
2024 Windows Onto Hume, (exhibition, digital storytelling) City of Hume (tendered project). Co-tendered in collaboration with History at Work Consulting Historians.
2020 From this Place, Ballarat. An investigation into how a community deals with difficult heritage. Funded by PROV
2020 Meet Raffy. An International Student shares their Covid-19 experience in Melbourne.
2019 Wogs Like Us. An audio Collage documenting the perspectives of Italian-Australian in Melbourne.
Partnered with CO.AS.IT.
2015 Homefront War: Remembering & Forgetting Australia’s WW2 Internment Camp History,
Tatura Wartime Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum.
2014 When War Will End, War becomes a unifying bond between Australians. Screenings:
Remembrance Day Centenary Commemorative Program, Federation Square, Melbourne Victoria 2014.