Materiale d'archivio su Ketty La Rocca by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
My words. and you?
A privileged place where daily actions take place
False consciousness of language fuels universal paranoia
Expropriates any alternative gesture of meaning
Flattens any relief of behavior
Threatens any alien feeling
Like a ribbon on which parallel directions run forcibly
To shout “help” I have to say “help”!
In other words!
In this action that I would call conjugation
I am an example to myself and to others of total enslavement
To language, to its most attractive infrastructures,
I force myself to express myself through a refined example.
The others, who participate in the action, combine both a real drama
And my inner drama, my relationship with the medium:
Captivating, but sterile: language does not determine freedom
albeit an illusion, but contagiously proliferates,
creates victims
who conjugate their own condition and define it: you.
Ketty La Rocca
Materiale d'archivio su Ketty La Rocca by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
Ketty La Rocca
(La Spezia, 1938 - Florence, 1976)
Starting from her debut in Florence in the 1960s as part of Gruppo 70, Ketty La Rocca explored different expressive languages and linguistic codes in a path that places identity as reappropriation of the self and criticism of the standardization and stereotypes of mass communication in relation to the image of women.
In her burning artistic career, La Rocca carried out an investigation into writing and gestures, also extending her practice towards the environmental and performative dimension.
Materiale d'archivio su Ketty La Rocca by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
Among her installations, Specchi (Mirrors), created in 1967.
The work is made up of black metal cylinders containing mirrors that can be positioned on the ground or on the wall, set up in such a way as to reflect each other or to reflect the surrounding environment, being activated by the presence of the spectator.
In this space, the viewer makes an experience by becoming aware of his own body and questioning himself.
Ketty La Rocca uses installation and performance, also in relation to her research on language with Le presenze alfabetiche (Alphabetic presences), to the rediscovery of gesture and body.
Materiale d'archivio su Ketty La Rocca by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
The extreme phase of her work is characterized by Craniologie, that bring the gaze inside the body, tormented by the disease. The artist uses radiographs of her own skull, where she inserts her hand, her fist and/or her handwriting, as if to reaffirm the ongoing contrast between life and death.
Apollo e Dafne (1974) by Ketty La RoccaLa Galleria Nazionale
“With a morbid, we could say necrophilic, perspective, La Rocca does not look away; her gaze becomes lucid and disenchanted, but she insists on ‘those retrospective documents of failed therapeutic intervention’ to transfigure them again into poetry. And it is in this manipulating act where she changes those cold finds into vibrant and sensitive matter that this macabre dance turns out to be a peremptory, stubborn affirmation of life”.
Lara Conte
Ketty La Rocca and Lara Conte
Works cited:
Action carried out at Galleria Nuovi Strumenti in Brescia, March 1975, and at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, April 1975.
E. Del Becaro, Intermedialità al femminile: l’opera di Ketty La Rocca, Electa – MAXXI, Milano – Roma 2008, p. 205.
