Ketty La Rocca's Gesture, Speech and Word at Ferrara's PAC

The exhibition 'Ketty La Rocca. Gesture, Speech and Word' at the Padiglione d'arte contemporanea di Ferrara, organized for the 17th Biennale Donna, surveys the artist's brief career from the 1960s to the 1970s. La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) began around 1964 after contact with Gruppo 70 through elementary teacher Lelio Missoni, embracing visual poetry. Early works like 'Non commettere sorpassi impuri' and 'Sana come il pane quotidiano' fuse image and text to critique advertising and gender stereotypes, as noted by Francesca Gallo in the catalogue. The ground floor focuses on the letter J, featuring ironic photographs of the artist with a plastic J sculpture, now displayed amid posters from a past show at Galleria Duemila in Bologna. By the early 1970s, La Rocca shifted from verbovisual codes to body and gesture, seen in 'In principio erat' (1971) with hand photos and nonsense phrases, the early videotape 'Appendice per una supplica' (1972), and the performance 'Le mie parole, e tu?' (1975) with its unsettling audio loop and personal objects. The project 'In principio erat verbum' is presented with its original drawing and a structure enabling the first staging of this silent 'game-performance' relying on physiognomy and hand gestures. The show offers a comprehensive reconstruction of La Rocca's work from discourse to word to gesture, returning attention to a pioneer of 1960s-70s trends after nearly twenty years since her last exhibitions.