LOVELY-RATZ

Bio
Linda Pietrobelli (2001) and Ambra Zamengo (2002) are currently pursuing their 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
Bringing together performance and photography in the analysis of human dynamics, with a particular focus on interpersonal relationships and roles in society, our artistic research focuses on individual communication modes, privileging women and queer perspectives. Often, other people become the focal point of the creative process and the work itself.
We constantly work to create spaces for dialogue and reflection, stimulating an empathetic connection. In the harmonious union of aesthetics and conceptual research, our artistic practice shapes visual and theoretical connections through performative practices and bodily gestures. Through performance, we explore how the body interacts with the surrounding space, reinterpreting and shaping the environment through the body, and through its perception.
Body and garment merge in a close connection: clothes become a bearer of identity, both individual and cultural, interacting in a profound relationship that combines the concepts of fashion and performance. This approach allows us to explore and communicate the complex dynamics of human relationships, places, individuals, and communities.
In the pursuit of a pre-practical human and emotional dialogue, we are interested in better understanding the human being in all its facets, through a psychological and anthropological approach to understanding other cultures. Hence, our interest in connecting territory, nature, and the human subject through expressive means such as photography, performance, and other artistic channels.

Lacuna

installation
2023

Group exhibition “PESSE-CAN”, Laboratorio di Arti visive 2 (held by Francesco Zucconi with the collaboration of Simona Arillotta and Nicoletta Traversa), Magazzini Ligabue, Venice

A hundred (and more) attempts to capture a lagoon trace are exhibited in five prints, the result of an investigation into the possibility of immortalizing an environment, such as the Venice Lagoon, subject to continuous changes.

The sea is an ever-changing element, but it is also the space in which human presence tries to assert itself and influence environmental balances. If we shift our reflection to the Venice Lagoon, the environment we call 'natural' is in fact a deposit that collects centuries of modifications caused both by human activity and by natural processes. The human action has perpetuated itself regardless over the centuries, and it represents a paradigmatic case of ecosystem alteration. Lacuna presents itself as an archive and research project, a continuum of revelation through which we can investigate the relationship between humans and the environment.
Through direct contact between the paper medium and the areas of the Lagoon, there is an attempt to 'print' and therefore retain a trace of it. The non-invasive and 'non-violent' approach to the place results in something difficult to read and understand, the key to which must be sought precisely in the awareness of being in a geographical area that changes continuously before our eyes and cannot be retained or trapped.
In Lacuna, the action encapsulates the essence of emptiness, non-invasion, and exalts the evanescent trace: the one left by the water. The prints were made on different types and weights of paper, placed directly on the ground on which a slight pressure was applied through the hands. The hundred prints were executed on various islands of the Lagoon, including Sant'Erasmo, Certosa, and Pellestrina, in the period between April and May 2023. The result presented here coincides with the final phase of the study, including the sheets that remained almost unchanged following the printing process, aware that even the slightest elements impressed will eventually detach from the paper.
Lacuna is an archive of temporal stratification and a material proof of the encounter between human and natural passage; a contact also made of voids to be retraced to tell the perpetual renewal of the lagoon.

Work by Laura Vittoria Albertin, Giulia D’Esposito, Matilde Forte, Elena Gregorutti, Linda Pietrobelli, Ambra Zamengo