Giovanna Petrocchi
GIOVANNA PETROCCHI
Published 2 September 2025
Giovanna Petrocchi is one of the six artist part of the show Shaping the Unclaimed curated by Kati Ots and Trine Stephensen during the Tallinn Photomonth 2025. Shaping the Unclaimed is an international urban space exhibition that takes place in six locations around the Kaubamaja department store’s intersection. In an urban environment saturated with an overwhelming amount of stimuli, the project seeks ways in which art can offer moments of relief and open new perspectives on what we see and experience daily.
This urban landscape is a visually and historically charged area where layers of different eras as well as important landmarks of Tallinn meet. Kaubamaja department store and Viru Centre – two symbols of commercial architecture from different eras. A new skyscraper being built on the site of the former Estonian Academy of Arts. The polemic statue Dusk located on the terrace of the Viru Centre. A constant flow of people, both underground and on the ground. You are standing in a monumental environment – not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of meaning and visual intensity.
The site-specific works intervene with the urban space on multiple levels, turning up both on the usual walking paths as well as in places that tend to be often overlooked. The selection of artists is similarly diverse. All the artworks have been created specifically for the Kaubamaja intersection, and the artists from different generations and nationalities endow the exhibition with their unique perspectives and ways of relating to the space.
Tell us about your process. What reference or influence (if any) do you take from other mediums?
I work with collage, found images and 3D processes. I would usually start my images by digitally realtering an existing photograph. I would use it as a canvas where to start building my composition and sometimes I would scan new elements to add to it. I like to think of my collage as fragmented bits of virtual sculptures. I am really fascinated by historical artefacts and modernist sculptors so yes, sculpture is a huge inspiration for my practice.
Are these pictures concerned with exploring formal and aesthetical interests – studies of form, colour, movement, how things work together, or are they representational, metaphorical?
I don’t necessarily look for a specific aesthetic while I work on my images, but I can recognize a common thread within the majority of my projects. I tend to seek the essential, both in the form and in the story behind each image. I like to leave a few visual hints on what’s happening, but I prefer to let the viewer build his\her own personal narrative. I also enjoy repetition: it helps me to convey the idea of a classification method or that we are looking through an actual archive.
Typically, are your works more about construction or deconstruction?
I would say deconstruction when it comes to how I build each image but construction when it comes to the narrative. I use photographs of real, documented artefacts, but the way I represent them within my works is completely different from the that of museums classification. My effort is to give the impression of a fluidity of cultures and civilizations. Western institutions may present, for example, Pre-Columbian objects in a scientific, static, and rigid way, not even knowing how these objects were meant to be used, and therefore presented. I’m repurposing artefacts, not in their physicality, but as images, and I’m connecting them with elements that belong to different civilizations. It’s a way to say that we all come from the same Earth and that museal categorisations are problematic.
Are you a photographer or an artist using photography?
I would say the latter. I mainly use collages, but I recently went from collages to more sculptural work, by using 3D printing. This is not because I think of photography as limiting, on the contrary I believe photography can also be other things. A 3D object, for example, is a 3D print, while collage has a tridimensional aspect, too. We live in a period when photography has changed a lot, so I think it’s good to make photography communicate with other mediums and let it become something else. I’m really intrigued to find out what more it can be, how much I can push the boundaries of the medium and experiment with both subject and process.
Does your work reflect on the medium of photography or the photographic image? If so, is that intentional?
Yes, I do investigate the role of the medium and its implications. I often do this with irony and with a less ‘traditional’ photographic approach so it might be not that evident at first. The subject matter of my projects is intrinsically related to how I use the medium. What fascinates me about photography is that it shares with Archaeology the same ambivalence, because they’re supposed to be scientific methodologies, but they can never be objective. Both are leaving something out. When documenting an artefact, even if it is recorded as straightforwardly as possible, there is always something missing. And it’s the same with archaeology – there are missing fragments of statues or archaeological sites that escape our knowledge, we imagine what they looked like and their specific uses, but we can’t really say for sure what they were. So, there is this gap of information that is always filled with our imagination, and that is what’s interesting to me. I think that collage, especially, is a perfect medium to emphasise this fragmentation of information, both of past and present time.
Are you interested in the notion of your pictures as objects? Do you think about how their physicality may endure as you are photographing them or is that an afterthought?
Yes, as mentioned earlier I often think of my photographs as sculptures. I like bringing elements out of the frame, out of the print, and playing with the physical element. I enjoy this idea of disguising the one within the other, the photographic print within the actual object, and vice versa. I tend to create an installation where you can feel this metamorphosis, and the emphasis is on the objects and their performative quality.
Giovanna Petrocchi is an Italian photographer based between London and Rome. She graduated from the London College of Communication with a BA in Photography and 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).
Petrocchi’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions. By combining personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3d printing processes, Petrocchi creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings, virtual realities and ancient cultures. Drawing from museum displays and catalogues, the resulting view of historical narrative in her work is deliberately distorted. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragmented; presented as floating entities they no longer belong to neither a specific time nor museum. A recurrent feature in Petrocchi’s practice is the juxtaposition of futuristic and primordial scenarios and the combination of historical and fictional elements.
