'Altrimenti inventa' is a short archival documentary film, that addresses the lack of visual representations of NorthAfrican migrated in Italy before the 1990s, and attempts an experimental "reinvention" of the missing archive, starting with my family history and then moving towards a more collective dimension, questioning the themes of identity, memory, and their relationship with what we choose/have been choosed to preserve and why. The visual imaginary we carry is not a neutral space, nor is it spared from logics that shape the way things are seen and subsequently preserved. This short begins from my own observation—shared by other secondgeneration immigrants, children of people arrived in Italy from North Africa before the '90—of a difficulty in visually imagining the figures and stories of our parents in the years following their arrival and preceding our own birth. When the migratory phenomenon toward Italy still went unnoticed. Years preceding the introduction of visa for people coming from the "thirdworld", and therefore preceding the media imaginary that later circulated around NorthAfrican migration. Starting from the recognition of a potential absence of these subjects from the common visual imaginary, the film carries out a research process within Italian audiovisual archives. Through my father account of his early years in Italy, and through my own voice-over, I move through the archives seeking traces of these subjects, attempting to narrate his/their stories without images, thus highlighting the absence of these presences in the archives and, consequently, in the collective visual imaginary. The ultimate goal is to find ways to (re)create and restore this missing imaginary, in a continuous attempt to understand how to give image to a narrative that has none, ultimately revealing the research itself. By manipulating archival materials, the film visually conveys what cannot be found, the lack and inadequacy of the archives. The interaction between my father and me serves as the starting point to investigate something that extends beyond us. Re-creating, “inventing,”makes sense—and perhaps is only possible—when the research expands into a collective endeavor. My father's story functions as a micro-story that then widens its scope. By involving two secondgeneration immigrants of NorthAfrican origin again in dialogue with a parent who arrived in Italy before the '90s, the film continues this reconstruction of an absent imaginary. Through the stories of other people who arrived in those years the film outlines the possibility of “responding” to representational absence in the archives by reconstructing a collectivized memory, a collection of personal stories, creating a small collective oral “archive” from which others may draw, and which can continue to grow.