Voce ‘e stommache

Lina Pallotta moved to the United States in the late 1980s to study at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York in photojournalism and documentary photography. It is there that she undertook intimate and poetic work talking portraits of friends, colleagues, poets and performers for over twenty years.
She subsequently returned to Italy, to Rome, where she continued her activity as an artist, documentary photographer and academic, and where she still lives today. Pallotta’s methodology is to move outside the institutional narratives pursued by the mass media, in search of private stories and psycho-geographical spaces in which glimpses of real life merge with socio-cultural meanings, away from clichés and stereotypes.
In her images we can read a complicity between the author and the subject represented, an empathetic alliance founded on a project of redemption, emancipation and social justice aimed at breaking down the wall of exclusion imposed by anti-progressive visions of society. Her first solo exhibition in an Italian public institution, Volevo vedermi negli occhi at the Centro Pecci in Prato in 2023, was a portrait of Porpora Marcasciano, a transsexual activist, in which Pallotta expressed thirty years of friendship and political militancy.

The photographic works on display are part of a collaborative project with Loredana Rossi, which began in 2011 and was born from a mutual friendship with Marcasciano.
Rossi is the founder and vice-presidentof the ATN – Transsexual Association of Naples,a non-governmental organization that protects the rights, health and dignity of trans people from all forms of discrimination and violence,providing support in the transition and sex change process. During the residency, Pallotta immersed herself in the daily life of Rossi and the community of trans and “femminielli” people of different generations who found in her a point of reference and a source of inspiration in the path of exploration and research of their own gender identity.
Spontaneously, the project arrived in the spaces of the Paul Thorel Foundation, where the artist created her first studio portraits and ventured into the field of color for the first time, to emphasize the many signs of identity search that encompass every aspect of a person’s life.
In Voce ‘e stommache, Pallotta transfers a selection of photographs onto a mirrored surface which reflects in a diaristic style the plurality of stories of the Neapolitan trans community and at the same time contains the bodies of the visitors. In an attempt to shorten the distance between life and narration, the artist chooses to share a sociality marked by discrete moments – from makeup to shopping, from aperitif to event – dotted with gestures of peace, smiles, hugs and a widespread sense of sisterhood.