Rocco Venezia

To me, there seems to exist an exact time of the day when things are revealed under the warmest sun, bringing out their own mute truth. Wondering at the margins of southern Europe realities, where the ephemeral daily life remains becoming temporary sculptures, like slags of a classicism in disruption that acquire a life of their own, I wish to punctuate this search of the ordinary. 

It is only by stopping time that it is possible to perceive its inexorable passage. In the eternal flow, every object, every surface and every fracture are silent witnesses questioning us with a unique enigma to solve. 

I want my work to search for a contemporary and personal vision of the cultural and economic crisis which afflicts the Mediterranean area, the heart of European civilisation. By visiting southern Europeans countries like Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, the so-called PIGS, my aim is to investigate their contemporary surfaces and trace a comprehensive visual representation of their dreamlike reality.

Rocco Venezia (Italy, 1991) works mainly with mythology, literature and the European political and economic situation.  He holds a first class honours degree in Documentary Photography from Newport, University of South Wales. His latest work, Nekyia, is a book published in 2017 by Witty Kiwi. The monograph is part of the collection at the National Art Library of Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Colección Folio at Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City. Rocco also works as curator and producer for PHmuseum, and he is the co-founder of Photo Meliggoi, a photography residency in Greece.