LOVELY-RATZ

Bio
Linda Pietrobelli (2001) and Bri Zamengo (2002) graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Arts at IUAV University of Venice.
In 2023, they formed the collective “LOVELY-RATZ”, born from the desire to work together, engaging with the dimension of the other and considering it as necessary for the development of thought.

Statement
By combining performance and photography to explore human dynamics, our research focuses on interpersonal relationships and social roles through queer and transfeminist perspectives, placing relational processes at the core of practice.
Collaboration is both a method and an ethical position: we understand artistic research as a shared process shaped by relations between people, objects, spaces, and practices, aiming to create spaces for encounter, reflection, and empathetic connection.
Our work unfolds between aesthetic exploration and conceptual inquiry through performative and embodied practices. We investigate how the body engages with and reconfigures space through perception. Garments act as carriers of identity, bridging fashion and performance as intertwined languages.
We engage with territory, nature, and communities, using situated and adaptive methodologies informed by care, slowness, and presence. Objects, gestures, and collective actions function as relational mediators, activating shared memory and forms of belonging.
These processes aim to generate temporary communities and micro-utopian spaces, where affective and political forms of resistance can emerge within everyday life.

After a long day

performance
15’
2023

After a long day, Castello Gallery, Venice
Performance by Linda Pietrobelli and Ambra Zamengo
After a long day focuses on a gesture that is typically performed at home or in a private setting, where one feels comfortable.
The act of removing socks is a spontaneous, semi-automatic action, a fragment of everyday life that signifies the end of the day for many. The gesture is rhythmically repeated, taking off and putting back on the socks, to highlight its ritualistic nature and analyze how such ritualization can also influence its interpretation. The manner in which the action is performed, consistently and by two bodies already stripped of any other clothing, challenges the intimate nature of the gesture and the possibilities of preserving it.
Throughout the course of the performance, five individuals compulsively immortalize the scene, delineating with their movement a perimeter that optically encloses the environment in which everything unfolds. The final exacerbation of the action is characterized by the progressively increasing speed of execution and the increasingly amplified constraint of movements; it aims to focus attention on the instability of the boundaries between the public and private dimensions, compromising the delicate balance between the two spheres.
The practice explores the relationship between body, photography, and intimacy, analyzing the concept of privacy and the effect that photography can have on the perception of our gestures once they are made accessible and shareable.

Performer: Linda Pietrobelli / Ambra Zamengo / Emma Favetta / Francesco Fazzi / Davide Lo Presti / Carlotta Savio / Federico Stocco