The Ritual Aspect — A Conversation with Visual Artist Alessia Rollo
Alessia
Rollo
b. 1982 · South Italy · Perugia · EFTI Madrid · Photography · Parallel Eyes
She perforates negatives. She paints onto film. She takes two to three years to finish a project — and knows it is done when she can no longer look at the images. Her work reclaims what ethnography erased from Southern Italian culture.
Alessia Rollo was born in 1982 in South Italy, where she still lives and works. She completed her undergraduate degree in visual communication at the University of Perugia, followed by a Master in Creative Photography at EFTI in Madrid in 2009. For Alessia, rather than explaining or documenting a situation, photography is a medium that permits myriad metaphors. She explores the relationship between objects, human habits and society — her projects focused on the Mediterranean, often oriented toward expanding a sense of community through the re-appropriation of histories, memories and visual material.
Her work has been shown at Photo London, Mia Photo Fair Milano, Bitume Photofest Malaga, Shanghai Photo Festival and Galería Cero in Madrid. Her project Fata Morgana was selected as a finalist for the LensCulture Exposure Award in 2018.
Tell us about your creative process.
"I usually start to work from something that disturbs me for the way it is treated visually and conceptually. After I start to see images and read about the topic I want to investigate, I brainstorm with myself using notes, scratching, and pictures that I put on my studio wall."
"I am very slow in building my projects — it normally takes 2 to 3 years to finish them. When I reach a point where I can no longer look at those images, that is usually the time to show the project is finished."
"For me, photography is a medium that permits myriad metaphors. Rather than explaining or documenting a situation — it opens it."
"Between 1950 and 1960, South Italy — the place I am from — was visually studied, classified and judged by a group of anthropologists, filmmakers and photographers. This process, started by the ethnographer Ernesto De Martino, resulted in the conviction of our culture as backward, ignorant and completely dominated by irrationality and religion."
"My aim is to offer a more complex analysis of South Italian culture — to re-consider in visual, historical and sociological terms the construction of the identity of our culture. I intervene the archive pictures using digital and analogue manipulation, painting of negatives or perforating them: my aim is to introduce back into the images the magical and ritual aspect erased by the scientific approach of the photographers."
"On the other side I am documenting, through my camera, rituals that still exist in South Italy."
"Living in a place close to the sea to swim at least 7 months per year, have time for my friends and family, make nice visual projects and smell Mediterranean flavours."
You will also love
From the Antakly Projects archiveUncompromising Italian activist and artist — a kindred spirit in using creative work to reclaim what gets erased.
Read on Antakly Projects ↗ Ceramics · ItalyItalian ceramic artist whose relationship to material and memory shares the same Mediterranean depth as Alessia's practice.
Read on Antakly Projects ↗ Photography · ItalyItalian photographer from the Antakly Projects archive — documentary instinct, personal vision, the same country seen from another angle.
Read on Antakly Projects ↗Antakly Projects — originally Ninu Nina — has been in conversation with artists, photographers and creatives from across the world since 2003. Alessia Rollo was our last artist interview of 2022, and her practice — patient, political, surrealist, Mediterranean — is exactly the kind of work this archive was built to hold.
Explore her work at alessiarollo.it and follow at @alesrollo
And for the personal rants, opinions you didn't ask for, and the occasional existential spiral: follow me on Substack.
The magical and ritual aspect erased — and then brought back. ✦