For her own imaginary landscapes the young Italian photographer Giovanna Petrocchi (1988) is inspired by surrealist paintings, virtual realities and ancient cultures. An important feature of Giovanna’s photographic based work is to juxtapose futuristic and primordial scenarios. Influenced by museum displays and catalogues, Giovanna creates her own collection of surreal contemporary artefacts and finds the fitting counterpart in archeological objects. Under her hands some archival images are presented untouched, while others are dismembered or combined with new limbs or partners. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragment; presented as floating entities they belong to neither specific time or museum.
In this way Giovanna is questioning the idea that cultures can be contained by national boundaries and institutions. Under her guidance cultures and traces of cultures seem to present themselves in constant flux, subject to transformative processes of migration and exchange.
Petrocchi graduated from the London College of Communication with a BA in Photography in 2015 and completed her MA in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, London. In 2017 she was selected as a winner of the Lens Culture Emerging Talent Award and in 2019 she exhibited her latest body of work at The Photographers’ Gallery as part of TPG New Talent mentoring programme. She has been recently nominated by CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia to be part of the 2020 FUTURES photography talents that was hosted from FLATLAND. Recent exhibitions include ‘With Monochrome Eyes’ at the Borough Road Gallery, London, and the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum, Athens. In 2021 Petrocchi presented her work in the exhibition “Contemporary Mythologies: The Monteverdi Project, at the Tenuta di Monteverdi estate in Tuscany, Italy curated by Camilla Grimaldi .
“What I particularly like about Giovanna’s art is that it is applying ancient artefacts into contemporary art, a new dimension of individual identity, and also it is a continuation of the life of the artefacts, which is a process known as Processes of Systemic Context in archaeology, and of course I find her works interesting and aesthetically beautiful”.