Ketty La Rocca

Se io fotovivo. Opere 1967-1975

The exhibition, curated by Raffaella Perna and Monica Poggi, and made possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ketty La Rocca Archive, and with the contribution of the Galleria Frittelli in Florence, explores for the first time the relationship between Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia 1938 – Florence 1976) and photography, in order to highlight the crucial role that this medium played in her way of representing the body and gesturality, as well as documenting her performative activity. Indeed, right from her earliest works, the artist used photography in the form of verbal-visual collages, composing images and writings taken from the magazines and journals of the day, but it was the publication of the photo book In principio erat in 1971 that marked an important turning point in the artist’s career, as she began to have herself portrayed while making hand gestures, thus focusing on the relationship between photography, the body and verbal language. From that moment on, her research and her horizon of cultural references broadened, and the focus on mass media that had marked the first phase of her work – linked to her activity with Gruppo 70 – then shifted towards primordial forms of expression based on the body, with a significant opening towards anthropological studies, the history of prehistoric cultures and non-European rituals.

Among the themes she addressed, the role of women within the mass media and an explicit critique of capitalism and the influence of the Church within modern society emerge forcefully. In addition to the stereotyped imagery of women’s publishing that characterised her early research, La Rocca also added historical imagery to her repertoire, such as those taken from the Alinari archives, or scientific ones, as in the case of Craniologie, where she uses X-rays of the skull, superimposed onto photographs of hands or handwritten phrases. In this phase, photography took on a central role for her, which the exhibition documents through a selection of more than fifty works, dated from between 1967 and 1975, including images of her performances, works with hand gestures and facial expressions linked to studies on physiognomy, works produced using a Xerox copier, up to the series of the previously mentioned Craniologie and Riduzioni, in which La Rocca brings photography back under the domain of subjectivity through the use of handwriting.