Rebecca Moccia was born in Naples in 1992. She lives and works in Milan.
In her transdisciplinary practice, Moccia explores the materiality of perceptive and emotive states that can emerge from specific social and spatial characteristics.
As the artist explains: “I could describe my work as the creation of medial atmospheres, spatialized emotions, that surround the body, but also that traverse and interact with it. As opposed to frames that delineate or isolate sections of space and attention, I am interested in creating situations that are placed in socio-cultural and psycho-physical contexts within specific temporal and actual elements such as the temperature, seasonality and past.” (Rebecca Moccia, 2020).
Between 2013 and 2018, with the series Un linguaggio inaudito (An Unheard-of Language), works on gender dynamics in the Italian language, investigating signs and semantic relationships.
With Coraggio (2017) Moccia expresses a “generational manifesto” (Sergio Risaliti, 2020). A context-specific work, it is a word in white enamel written on a rooftop in Milan during a rainy day. A manifesto and a declaration of intents and feelings. Visible only from a bird’s eye view, the work despite its public dimension, becomes intimate, looking like a ritual message destined to something superhuman.
Da qui tutto bene (Everything Looks Alright from Here) is a context-specific work designed for Museo Novecento’s 14th century cloister in Florence. Between September 2019 and January 2020, in the monumental complex of the Ex Leopoldine, originally intended for reading, meditation and silent confrontation, the artist reflects with the contradictions of our time, between the promiscuity of reality and its representation. “The ‘negative shadows’ projected on the walls through blue back paper mark the light of dawn on the opening day of the exhibition, which was traced and calculated by a lighting software. These shadows become poster paper glued on the reverse, showing the back, the negative, the useless side. Therefore, is it not an image printed or reproduced on a poster, but it is no image.” (Roberto Lacarbonara, 2020)
It is this critical research relating to the neoliberal regime of visibility and positivity that we find throughout her practice relating to conditions of opacity and unavailability, as well as of ambiguity, subtraction, the negative.
Between 2020 and 2022, Moccia has been artist fellow at Castro projects (Rome), artist in residency at Casa degli Artisti (Milan), Outset Climavore Residency (London), and winner of “Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere” – promoted by Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the Ministry of Culture – to produce Rest your eyes, commissioned by and acquired in the collection of MAMbo (Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna). The installation – conceived during the first pandemic year – features a news broadcast on mute, as well as audio speakers located throughout connected to multi-language all-news web radio stations. The projected news images have been blurred and made unrecognizable through a filter created by the artist, becoming disturbing yet familiar like the overlapped, distant, and distorted chronicles coming from the audio speakers. “The installation was conceived during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced us to radically rethink the relationship between the public and private dimensions of our lives. When trying to shield from the risks of physical contact, we discovered ourselves exposed to the evidence that our lives are inevitably and globally interconnected. Through our domestic screens – computer and television – we have experienced an infodemic that tires the eye and pollutes the mind, but also a new dimension of public intimacy.” (Annalisa Pellino, 2021)
In 2022, Moccia won an international research grant promoted by Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture within the program Italian Council, with her project Ministry of Loneliness. The project was created in collaboration with Outset England, Jupiter Woods, Magazzino Italian Art, Embassy of Italy in Tokyo, ICA Milan and included residences in London, New York, and Tokyo.
Moccia’s works have been displayed in solo and collective exhibitions in several institutions, such as: Jupiter Woods, London; Italian Cultural Institute, Brussels; Museo Novecento, Florence; Toast Project Space, Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence; The Open Box, Milan; Palazzo delle Poste, Verona; MACRO, Rome; Palazzo Palmieri, Monopoli; Franzenfeste, Brixen; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa; Réféctoire des Nonnes, ENSBA, Lyon; Via Farini, Milan.
Rebecca Moccia is one of the founding members of AWI – Art Workers Italia.
