23 Mar 2016

Ketty La Rocca New studies

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Where and when

23March 2016

Orario

17:30

Museo Novecento

Free admission subject to availability

Stefano Pezzato dialogue with the curators Raffaella Perna and Francesca Gallo, together with Lucilla Saccà, one of the authors of the volume.

Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) is one of the protagonists of the neo-avant-garde Italian. In 1956 she settled in Florence, where she began to collaborate with Gruppo 70, creating collages based on the relationship between media image and speech, in which she highlighted an early attention to the condition of women. At the beginning of the Seventies the artist focuses on the language of gestures, dealing with themes and iconography of anthropological, through different practices and media: photography, video, performance, artist’s book. In 1972 she was invited to the XXXV Venice Biennale, and from this moment her work gained wide national and international visibility. In 1978 she was given a retrospective exhibition at the Venice Biennale. His works are now preserved in numerous collections of museums and foundations, including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART), the National Museum of Arts of the 21st century (MAXXI), the Museo Novecento in Florence and the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan. In recent years her works have been included in some important exhibitions dedicated to the relationship between art and feminism, in particular Wack! Art and Feminist Revolution at MOCA in Los Angeles (2007) and Woman: feminist avant-garde in the 70s at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (2010). 

The contributions published in the book take a new and transversal look at his research, to return through different perspectives and unpublished documentary sources the multiple areas of interest and cultural references of the artist, from linguistics to semiotics, to anthropology, to psychology. The book deals with the work of La Rocca in the light of the artistic and cultural context of the sixties and seventies, analyzing in particular the relationship with visual poetry, the peculiar interest in photography, video and performance, and links with the neo-avant-garde and with the Italian and international feminist debate. 

The book, published by Postmedia books, collects texts by Silvia Bordini, Ada De Pirro, Elena Di Raddo, Francesca Gallo, Raffaella Perna, Lucilla Saccà. 

Raffaella Perna is a research fellow at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. His studies have focused mainly on the links between the Italian neo-avant-garde of the sixties and seventies and photography and on the relationships between art and feminism in Italy, topics to which he has dedicated several essays, lectures and books: Art, photography and feminism in Italy in the seventies (2013), Mimmo Rotella and the Galerie J (2012), Mimmo Rotella. Reportages (2010), In form of photography. Artistic research in Italy between 1960 and 1970 (2009). She is also curator of the volumes: Ethics and photography. Power, ideology and violence of the photographic image (with I. Schiaffini, 2015); The feminist gesture. La rivolta delle donne: nel corpo, nel lavoro, nell’arte (with I. Bussoni, 2014) and Le polaroid di Moro (with S. Bianchi, 2012). He curated the exhibition, still in progress, Altra misura (Galleria Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Florence), with over one hundred works by Italian feminist artists and photographers.

Francesca Gallo teaches History of Contemporary Art at the Sapienza University of Rome. She has dealt with the connection between theory and executive techniques in art and art criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His interests then focused on the neo-avant-garde and new media, with studies dedicated to video and performance in Italy (“Ricerche di storia dell’arte”, 2006 and 2014) and references to the ancient in Italian art of recent decades. He dedicated several studies and a monograph to Jean-François Lyotard and Les Immatériaux (Aracne 2008). The proceedings of the conference (edited with A. Simonicca) dedicated to the Ephemeral between art and anthropology are coming out.

Stefano Pezzato is responsible and curator for the exhibitions and the collection of the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato. He has followed numerous special projects including Bert Theis, Building Philosophy of 2009 and, in the same year, curated the exhibition Wonder World. Expecting a Restless Future at the Ekaterina Foundation, special project for the third Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2005, 2007, 2010 he curated the exhibition Gemine: Muse for the city of Prato and in 2015 the exhibition SYNCHRONICITY. Contemporaries, from Lippi to Warhol at the Praetorian Palace Museum with works by, among others, Andy Warhol, Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Marina Abramovic, Marchel Duchamp, Yves Klein and Bruce Nauman. He also edited the publication of numerous exhibition catalogues. Among the critical texts are the two essays on the birth and development of video art published in the volume L’art du xxe siècle 1939-2002. De l’art moderne à l’art contemporain published by Citadelles&Mazenod. 

Lucilla Saccà is professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Florence, in the past she also taught at ISMEO in Milan and at DAMS in Bologna. She dealt with the experiments of the sixties and seventies with particular attention to poor art, the theme of transmigration and cultural contamination, as well as the relations between Italy and Latin America, curated exhibitions of many artists such as Mimmo Paladino and Giovanni Anselmo. In 1994 she was appointed Italian curator of the 22nd Bienal Internacional in São Paulo. Since the late nineties she has been engaged in the study of verb-visual scriptures, an investigation of the Italian and Florentine neo-avant-gardes of the sixties and their relations with other international realities. At the beginning of the 2000s he published the collection Ketty La Rocca, my words and then the book Ketty La Rocca: his writings. 

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