Giovanna Petrocchi is an italian photographer based between London and Rome. She graduated from the London College of Communication with a BA in Photography in 2015 and she recently completed her MA in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, London. In 2017 she won the Lens Culture Emerging Talent Award and in 2019 she was selected as a winner of The Photographers’ Gallery New Talent award and mentoring programme. She has been recently nominated by CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia to be part of the FUTURES photography talents (2020).

Recent exhibitions include: ‘Contemporary Mythologies: The Monteverdi Project’, solo show curated by Camilla Grimaldi at the Tenuta di Monteverdi in Tuscany, Italy (2021) – UNSEEN photo fair (Amsterdam, 2021) – Paris Photo fair (2021) with Flatland Gallery and ‘Hybrid mythologies and migrating tales’ solo show at Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam (March, 2022).

By combining personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3d printing processes, Giovanna creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings virtual realities and ancient cultures. Influenced by museum displays and catalogues, she populates these landscapes with her own collection of surreal artefacts. The received view of historical narrative is deliberately distorted. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragment; presented as floating entities they belong to neither specific time or museum. A recurrent feature in Giovanna’s practice is the juxtaposition of futuristic and primordial scenarios and the combination of historical and fictional elements.

Under her guidance cultures and traces of civilizations present themselves in constant flux, subject to transformative processes of migration and exchange.