Developed between 2006 and 2021, it centres on the "April 7th" trial (1983–84), a landmark inquiry and legal case against members of the Italian leftist movement Autonomia Operaia. The project has unfolded through installations, sculptures, performances, reading groups, films, and printed matter, presented at (among many others): MAXXI—National Museum of 21st Century Art, 2010; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, 2012; e-flux, New York, 2013; Wiels, Brussels, 2014; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, 2024.
The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial's archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script,
The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and
Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial's key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.
Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work's ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions.
The Trial resists closure, offering instead a mutable framework for engaging with political history, collective memory, and the performative nature of justice.
Rossella Biscotti (born in 1978 in Molfetta, Italy, lives and works between Rotterdam and Brussels) uses montage as a gesture to reveal individual narratives and their relation to society while simultaneously revealing the supports that create these narratives. In her cross-media practice, cutting across filmmaking, performance and sculpture, she explores and reconstructs social and political moments from recent times through the subjective experiences of individuals often posed against the backdrop of violent institutionalized systems. By integrating her personal experience and oral narratives into the recounting of new stories, she undertakes the construction of an unofficial account of history that lives on the margins of official discourse. Often using a site of investigation as a starting point, differing and even contradictory accounts are sensibly weaved together into novel visual narratives. By examining the relevance of the recovered material from a contemporary perspective, Biscotti creates links and networks to the present, empowering the spectators' imagination, culture and experience.
