Fiamma Montezemolo's 'Hidden in Plain Sight' Chronicles Anthropologist's Shift to Visual Artist

Fiamma Montezemolo's book 'Hidden in Plain Sight' (NERO Editions, 2024) traces her transformation from anthropologist to visual artist. The work is an anthology and intellectual biography, guided by the tutelary deity Hermes as messenger and intermediary. Key influences include her mother, sociologist Maria Immacolata Macioti, who studied the 'fornaciari' families of Valle dell'Inferno between Monte Ciocci and Vatican in the 1970s–80s. Montezemolo's artistic shift matured through years of research in Tijuana and Texas, engaging with Maya descendants, Chicanos in the USA, and Zapatista groups in Chiapas. Her experimental video essay 'Rastros/Traces' (2012) intertwines ethnographic research and artistic form, meditating on the US–Mexico border wall between San Diego and Tijuana. The book explores the wall as an epistemological figure—a threshold that paradoxically stimulates knowledge, imposing a point of view and condensing injustice. Montezemolo's anthropological essays analyze self-representation of Mexican natives and Mato Grosso Brazilians as rebellion against traditional anthropological gaze, and the Zapatistas' use of balaclavas to shift focus from somatic traits to political projects. The title alludes to producing knowledge by challenging univocal visual regimes, offering tools to dismantle the gaze and return it to its embodied dimension.