Galileo Rocca

When Galileo Rocca revisits Cesare Zavattini's places he is well aware that it is not a matter of producing “Un Paese, 60 anni dopo” (A village, 60 years later).  
Galileo Rocca addresses the theme of places, the theme – nowadays so problematical and ambiguous – of local identity and its very legitimacy, with several important changes. When Strand decided – after considering various hypotheses – to portray Cesare Zavattini's village, he showed that humanity reveals itself in “minor” and “ordinary” situations rather than in remarkable and exceptional ones (in New Mexico in 1932 as in Luzzara in 1952), and produced an outstanding work out of a secluded spot, creating an exceptional episode in the History of Images by turning spaces, bodies and faces into images (photographs). Rocca's work picks up from that space – the now renown place-name that is synonymous with an idea of a universal place (and a universal humanity). That episode has been considered by many subsequent authors as almost paradigmatic of the nation's image, and by many across our planet and other nations, as a paradigm of 'Italianness', no less. Rocca thus addresses an exceptional chapter in the history of photography in Italy and pays tribute to the exceptional quality of those photographs, circling round them and carving out a landscape of “ordinariness” where the recognizable traces of Luzzara (the bell tower behind the embankment, the village corner, and so on) are minimal linkages to Strand's work. The images of Luzzara shift into a different zone, from the town to the landscape, we might say, into the outlying area of the now fraying urban boundaries (an area which nevertheless constitutes a large portion of the real landscape) so precariously associated with codified genres, often set somewhere between a degraded and a picturesque sense of abandonment, where nature swallows up what man has built. Piecemeal images of almost-geological stratifications of natural elements and debris or abandoned objects. It is often these merely functional elements without any aesthetic quality (the crossing bar, the cistern, the concrete barrier as well as the embankment, the man-made feature of the landscape) that make up the frames of the shots and suggest visions within the images, picking up on the theme of the prominence of “involuntary sculptures”, which has distant origins in Ghirri, links back to the Bechers and is reminiscent of the work of Enrico Bedolo from Bergamo. Galileo Rocca then explores Cerreto Alpi and Sant’ Alberto, also associated with Zavattini; he elaborates and enriches the spectrum of local colours and spaces, keeping in mind all the while the need for a unitary compilation and a unity of the narrative. He does not reduce his narrative to a minor epic poem of the Po Plains, the poetics of platitude which is subtly invading the hills of the Emilia region around here. There are few figures to be seen (a novel feature in the work of the young photographer), identified without any claims to statistical or sociological reliability. His selection is guided instead by the logic of chance encounters which reliably convey the real human element, and is enriched by the natural habit of exchanging pleasantries (we can see this in the photos) and of telling of one's place in the world and in the nation in a few sentences.

Galileo Rocca is a professional photographer with many solo and group exhibits to his name. In 2010 he was awarded a scholarship funded by the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan in collaboration with LDPF2010 (Lucca digital photo festival). On the occasion of the 9th Portfolio of Ariosto – SONY award in Castelnovo di Garfagnana (Lucca) he received the third prize and published his project entitled “Trasformazioni, il tempo sospeso” (Transformations, suspended time) in the specialist magazine Gente di fotografia.