Call for Papers: Ketty La Rocca symposium

One-day Symposium – Call for Papers
Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde
Tuesday 11 November 2025
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

From her early collaboration with the visual poets of the Florentine Gruppo 70, to her later conceptual art
that brought her to the attention of leading international feminist critics and practitioners, Italian visual poet
and artist 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 neither belongs 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 to coincide with the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s brief yet stimulating
career, Royal Holloway University of London and the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art invite
250-word proposals for cross-disciplinary papers of 20 minutes, or short work-in-progress papers of 10
minutes, taking the above themes as a starting point and exploring them in the context of art history and
literary or cultural studies.

Themes for investigation might include, but are not limited to:
– New readings of La Rocca’s work
– Intermedia experimentation in Italy c. 1960–75
– Italian feminism in the 1960s and 1970s

All proposals should be sent to symposium@estorickcollection.com by 31 August 2025