DEPICTION OF AN IDOL | Giovanna Petrocchi

Giovanna Petrocchi’s work reconfigures the terms of anthropological research to rethink the definitions of archive, catalogue and collection. Inspired by taxonomies adopted in collections of ancient art in Western museums, Petrocchi weasels her way into their timelines, tampering with sources, materials and stories, setting up these finds into new archaeological narratives.

Through the appropriation of the virtual collection of the Smithsonian Institution, the artist acts on its visual archive: some images are dismembered, others recomposed, others re-contextualized, erasing their provenance like they could belong to any museum, any collection.

Petrocchi acts on the negatives of these finds to modify their information, thus creating new surreal documents of findings from possible distant cultures. The artist builds her own imaginary museum, in which distortion, accumulation, anachronism and divergence are necessary to give life to possible scenarios of peaceful coexistence between mythologies, traditions and distant events.

Giovanna Petrocchi, Depiction of an Idol, 2019
from the series Modular Artefacts, Mammoth remains
Archival inkjet print, variable dimensions
©The artist
10/09/2020