Almost two decades after the last anthological exhibition in Italy and eighty years after his birth, Ketty La Rocca 80. Gesture, Speech and Word , curated by Francesca Gallo and Raffaella Perna, and produced in collaboration with Michelangelo Vasta’s Ketty La Rocca Archive, offers a wide selection of works based on the relationship between verbal language and the body, the core of the artist’s poetics.
Ketty La Rocca, who moved to Florence in 1956, came into contact with Visual Poetry in the 1970s, participating in the activities of Gruppo 70. In this context, the Collages and Cartelli, based on the relationship between media image and word, highlight an early attention to the female condition: with a pungent gaze, in fact, La Rocca mocks clichés, placing under indictment the process of reification of the female body in contemporary communication. Also dedicated to language and its pitfalls are Verbigeration (1973) and the two embroidered pillows of 1975, halfway between work and personal object, never exhibited until now.

1970 was the year of his first solo exhibitions, where the artist presented the Letters-Sculpture in black PVC: “alphabetic presences” that transcend two-dimensionality by concretely occupying space and interacting with it. The exhibition offers a novel and evocative setting of the series, aimed at emphasizing the phenomenological quality of such works.

In the 1970s, La Rocca focused on the language of gestures, working on themes and iconographies with an anthropological slant, through a plurality of expressive strategies and different media: photography, video, artist’s book and performance, mostly hinging around the artist’s body. 1971 is a pivotal year, the visual image seems to have the upper hand over the word and bodily communication over linguistic communication: at this juncture In principio erat, the photographic book from which the famous videotape Appendice per una supplica (1972), both presented at the Venice Biennale that year, sees the light. The two works sanctioned the artist’s international recognition, particularly the video, one of the first made in Italy and certainly the first created by a woman.

During the 1970s, La Rocca devoted himself to the Reductions, usually made from photographs trouvées, where the outlines of the images are retraced on paper by the artist’s handwriting, which writes nonsense words alternating with the pressing “you.” At this stage he also works on Craniologie, a series in which he intervenes on X-rays of the skull, superimposing on them photographs printed on transparent plates of “encapsulated gestures”-an open hand, a finger, a clenched fist-and the obsessive repetition of the word “you” that devours the image.

More recent studies have brought to light the centrality of performance in La Rocca’s work, carried out in a choral manner and always from nonsensical, repetitive texts, full of interjections and bureaucratic expressions, reiterating the inability of historical languages to communicate authentically. This applies not only to Verbigeration (1973), but also to the more well-known My Words, What About You? (1975), the last action performed on several occasions around Italy, several documentation photographs of which are offered at the Contemporary Art Pavilion in addition to the original audio.

The exhibition of the 17th Women’s Biennale also features loans from the Mart in Rovereto, La Galleria Nazionale, the Palli Collection, the Frittelli Collection, Teche Rai and the Quadriennale d’Arte in Rome.

Ketty La Rocca 80. Gesture, Speech and Word
April 15-June 3, 2018
Pavilion of Contemporary Art
Corso Porta Mare 5, 44121 Ferrara

Edited by.

Francesca Gallo and Raffaella Perna

Organizers

UDI Women’s Biennial Committee (composed of Lola G. Bonora, Silvia Cirelli, Catalina Golban, Anna Quarzi, Ansalda Siroli, Dida Spano, Liviana Zagagnoni) and Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art.