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.

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 Linda Pietrobelli, Bri Zamengo, Laura Vittoria Albertin, Giulia D’Esposito, Matilde Forte, Elena Gregorutti