EMA is an Italian painter, collage artist and story-teller based in Geneva.
EMA’s recent visual works (2020-24) propose the viewers a framed mix of prehistorical,
historical and contemporary ingredients meant to inform our collective philosophical,
psychiatric and geo-political analysis and reflection around who we were, who we have
become, and where we are heading to as human race, and why, mixing figurative,
abstract, ironic, magic and surreal elements to depict alternatively dystopian, apocalyptic
and utopian past and future worlds, using psychedelic, brilliant and fluorescent colors, in
many cases portraying animals as a metaphor for humans.
In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, EMA produced the twelve collages of the
‘Coronavirus series’, addressing themes such as mental disease and children’s
education, capitalism, exploitation, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, imperialism,
colonialism and anti-colonialism, racism, slavery, inequality, revolt and revolution,
courage and love. In the ‘Lucid Dreaming series’ (2021-22), EMA developed abstract
works influenced by the style of the artistic movements of the early twentieth century,
such as orphism, cubism and futurism, to describe the intersection between sleep and
insomnia, and healing. In 2022-23, EMA exhibited these and other works in Geneva,
Monaco Zug, Turin, Pisa, New York and Brussels.
During the same period, EMA developed the ‘Radioactive Beasts Series’, a project
motivated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the risk of military and nuclear
escalation between Russia and NATO, taking inspiration from George Orwell’s Animal
Farm. In April 2023, EMA screened the Radioactive Beasts in New York, during one
week, on a giant billboard in Times Square, with support from International Campaign to
Abolish Nuclear Weapons – ICAN, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
In his young years, when he was a student, EMA was also already a painter, a collage
artist, a story-teller, a singer, a music promoter and a radio journalist specialized in
Jamaican music.
After that, EMA spent over twenty-five years at the service of the United Nations and
other organizations, living and working in different countries and continents, and
especially in Africa, as part of UN peace-keeping operations or other field operations. His
entire life, EMA actively militated for the promotion of a culture of peace and equal rights,
including in war-torn countries such as Angola, Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, by organizing peace, human rights and active citizenship

 campaigns, working with media, intellectuals, musicians, dancers, theater actors and visual artists in
various countries.
In Angola, between 1998 and 2007, EMA directed human rights education campaigns,
organized human rights song contests and live shows, and promoted numerous human
rights-related radio and theater projects. Still today EMA maintains active artistic
collaborations with Angolan artists and musicians like Paulo Flores and Nelson Ebo.
In 2007-2009, EMA developed a collaboration with the then very popular Beppe Grillo’s
blog to produce and disseminate contents and interviews on conflicts in Africa with
historical figures and intellectuals from Africa and beyond, such as the 2004 Nobel
Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai and others. In 2009, EMA coordinated an online
campaign to commemorate the 1994 Rwandan genocide, publishing contents by the 1997 

Nobel Prize in Literature, Dario Fo, and other protagonists, survivors and experts of the genocide.

Among them, Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop recalled the example of Captain
Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese Army Captain and a United Nations military observer who
lost his life in Kigali, Rwanda, on 31 May 1994, after rescuing, unarmed, hundreds of
people. In 2009, EMA moved to Dakar, Senegal. There, along with Mbaye Diagne’s
family and Senegalese Army officers who were also in Rwanda during the 1994
genocide, EMA set up the Association of Captain Mbaye Diagne for the Culture of
Peace, to promote the Captain’s legacy. As the Secretary-General of the Association for
ten years (2009-2019), EMA produced films to popularize the Captain and organized
numerous events in Dakar, in Geneva and in New York in collaboration with the United
Nations, the BBC, Oxfam, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the ICRC, with the
participation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al
Hussein, the UN Special Adviser on the prevention of genocide Adama Dieng and
General Romeo Dallaire, and supported with visual artists to produce wall paintings of
the Captain in Dakar.
Since 2013, EMA also publishes on il Fatto Quotidiano online on human rights,
development and conflict, migrations, refugees and migrants’ rights, and African history.
In 2018, with the UN Television, EMA documented the water and hygiene challenges of
refugees and migrants at the Italian-French border of Ventimiglia.