Alessia Rollo, Altera Italia, 2026

“Altera Italia” is Alessia Rollo’s personal research about the culture she belongs to: her aim is to offer a more complex analysis of South Italian culture and to re-consider in visual, historical and sociological terms the construction of the identity of this culture. In between 1950 and 1960 South Italy, the place she is coming from, has been visually studied, classified and judged by a group of anthropologists, filmmakers and photographers. This process started by the famous ethnographer Ernesto De Martino had as result the conviction of South Italian culture as backward, ignorant and completely dominated by the irrationality and religion.

This project includes two main bodies of work: one consists in the manipulation of archive materials produced around the ’50 and ’60 of the past century by the photographers and videomakers belonging to the “scientific expeditions” of De Martino. At that purpose, Alessia Rollo intervenes on the pictures by using photographic techniques like digital and analog manipulation, painting of negatives or perforating them: her aim is to introduce back in the images the magical and ritual aspect erased by the scientific approach of the photographers. On the other side, she is documenting through her camera rituals that still exist in South Italy.

Her purpose is not to create a new anthropologic catalogue of celebrations but to build a different visual narrative about Southern roots in order to change the perception of our past and build a new imaginary of our future.