Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite
Film and Video Programme
March – June 2020
Ketty La Rocca, Appendice per une supplica, 1972
Edition of 5
Video
9 minutes 33 seconds
This video, realised in collaboration with Gerry Schum, was first shown at the 1972 Venice Biennale. It is the first of Ketty La Rocca’s works involving the use of hands as a poetic means of communication. She proposed hand-gestures as an alternative language, a form of communication based on bodily expression in which ‘there is a wealth of mythical, ritual, fantastic elements that are the heritage of humanity’.
The previous year she had made a proposal for a performance, 'In principio erat verbum' ['In the beginning was the word'], 1971, in which a set group of ten people were invited to have a dialogue with the audience through gesture alone, without speech or physical contact. This was first performed only recently at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Ferrara, in 2018, as part of the Biennale Donna, XVII.
Ketty La Rocca (1938-1976) is one of the most important Italian conceptual artists to have emerged from the 1960s. She lived and worked in Florence, initially as a leading member of Gruppo 70, a group of artists devoted to visual poetry and 'verbal-visual investigations'. Her early collage works were explorations of language in relation to the stereotypical imagery of everyday life with an emphasis on subverting the patriarchal depiction of women in contemporary mass culture.