Robert Pettena


Ancient rituals have reemerged in various walks of today’s technological life, denuded, however, of their original meaning.

Daniele Perra: You investigate the space that surrounds you by creating containers filled with images and video projections. Where does your interest in confronting the dialectical relationship between the internal and external, the body and its surface, come from?

Robert Pettena: The communication between our internal and external selves is not mirror-like. There is no correspondence between our thoughts and what we are able to transmit through them. Objects and bodies alike are read through a conventional language, whose various semantic games we know. And yet, their internal side remains obscure, discovered through itineraries like indecipherable maps in which our emotions constantly hit us in latent zones…




Daniele Perra
Translation by Jacqueline Smith