Rossella Biscotti

Rossella Biscotti
(Molfetta, 1978. She lives and works in Brussels.)

“Where do we start from? The muscles tense. One leg is the pillar that supports the body between heaven and earth. The other, a pendulum that swings from behind.

The heel touches the ground. All the weight of the body is brought forward on the forefoot. The big toe takes off, and here the weight of the body, in a delicate balance, moves again. […]"

"The most obvious and darkest thing in the world is this walking, which gets lost so easily in religion, philosophy, landscape, urban politics, anatomy, allegory and yearning.”

The steps imprinted on the concrete slab were left by Rossella Biscotti, and refer to the long rehabilitation which the artist underwent after an accident.

On Walking is a sculpture that tells a personal memory, but while celebrating a body, an imperfect body, a body that struggles, it evokes all the other bodies on the way: vulnerable, exposed and therefore resistant, courageous, political.

The demonstrations, the processions, the revolutions are made by walking.

Repetition, horizontality, performativity that in Mininimalism are functional to the renunciation of narration in sculpture, are instead used by Rossella Biscotti as a way in which historical, collective or personal memory becomes a form to be distributed again.

In continuity with recent works such as Sanikem–Nyai Ontosoroh–Madame Le Boucq, Maiko, Annalies, Mei, Surati, Princess of Kasiruta (2019), A Shirt, Blue Pants, Blue Jeans, a Towel (2018) or Klara (2018), On Walking testifies to an autobiographical fact, inscribing the subject, in particular when perceived as Other, within the collective body: “Humanity is never accomplished in isolation or even in the exposure of one’s work to the public. Only those who expose their life and their person to the risk of the public sphere can achieve it.”

Cecilia Canziani