Symposium
Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde
Tuesday 11 November 2025, 10.00 – 19.00
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
From her early collaboration with Florence’s Gruppo 70, to her later conceptual art that brought her to the attention of leading international feminist critics and practitioners, Ketty La Rocca (1938–1976) has left behind a body of work that spans genres and media, including collage, performance, photography, video and body art. Yet she does not belong to the canon of the Italian Neoavanguardia, nor is she a well-established figure in the history of Italian art of the postwar era. As Lucy Lippard highlighted in her seminal book From the Centre (1976), during 1960s and 1970s women artists often met with a negative reception because of their perceived “lack of compliance with the evolutionary mainstream” of the art world.
La Rocca’s early experimentation with collage and text, her increasingly complex relationship with language in visual and concrete poetry, and her later groundbreaking use of videotape and feminist action, call for revaluation of her work and, importantly, offer a novel lens through which to rethink the work of postwar Italian art, neo-avant-garde practices, Italian feminist art, and the role of those artists and art forms that operated outside established boundaries.
Organised by Royal Holloway University of London, and the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, this symposium coincides with the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s brief yet stimulating career. The papers – presented by established scholars and early career researchers – will take the above themes as starting points, exploring them from a range of different perspectives.
Ticket includes drinks reception and an opportunity to view both the exhibition Ketty La Rocca: You You and the Estorick’s permanent collection.
£30 Standard / £25 Estorick Collection Members and Students
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Programme
10.00 – 10.30
Registration
10.30 – 10.45
Welcome
10.45 – 11.00
Ketty La Rocca
Michelangelo Vasta
11.00 – 11.30
The Body and Female Agency in the Work of Ketty La Rocca
Giuliana Pieri, Royal Holloway University of London
Session 1: Intermedia Experimentation in Italy, c. 1960-75
11.30 – 12.00
Dadamaino, Grazia Varisco and Nanda Vigo: The pioneering, Intermedial Approach to Experimentation in Kinetic Art in the 1960s and 1970s
Martina Borghi, University of Pavia / Royal Holloway University of London
12.00 – 12.30
Feminist Alliances: The Dialogue Between Ketty La Rocca and Romana Loda
Raffaella Perna, Sapienza University of Rome
12.30 – 13.30
Lunch break
Session 2: New Readings of La Rocca's Work
13.30 – 14.00
Ketty La Rocca and the Prehistory of Feminist Interface Culture
Emanuela Patti, University of Edinburgh
14.00 – 14.30
Ketty La Rocca’s ‘In principio erat’: New Readings
Catalina Golban, University of Ferrara
Session 3: Italian Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s
14.30 – 15.00
Materialisation of Resonance: Ketty La Rocca, Silvia Mejìa and the Feminist Politics of Gesture
Francesco Ventrella, University of Sussex
15.00 – 15.30
‘Una diversa futura globale gestione del mondo’: The Role of Poet Anna Bontempi Oberto in Fostering the Feminine and International Ethos of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde
Maria Elena Minuto, University of Liège / Royal Holloway University of London
15.30 – 16.00
Coffee Break
Session 4: Comparative Perspectives
16.00 – 16.30
Oeuvre/ouvrages’: Reading Craft in Post-war Italian Women’s Art
Kate Devine, Victoria and Albert Museum
16.30 – 17.00
Passages, Reductions: Ketty La Rocca’s and Rosemary Mayer’s Art History
Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge
17.00 – 17.30
Exhibiting Ketty La Rocca: The Curators of ‘You You’ in Conversation
17.30 – 19.00
Drinks reception
With an opportunity to view the exhibition Ketty La Rocca: You You as well as the Estorick’s permanent collection.