The photography of intimacy has always moved along a problematic ridge, suspended in balance between the desire to preserve the private dimension of experience and the need to share it through the public visibility of the image. Beyond autobiographical reasons, when an artist decides to photograph their own body, their domestic spaces and the vulnerable moments of everyday life, they are first and foremost performing an act of negotiation with their own presence in the world, forcing the boundaries between what is considered appropriate to show and what should remain hidden, and claiming the right to free their own representation from external impositions. The act of transforming the body into artistic material removed from normative standards takes on particular implications when put into practice by women, traditionally confined to the role of object rather than active subject of vision. In this territory of reclamation and redefinition lies the research of Erika Pellicci (Barga, Lucca, 1992), the protagonist at Galleria ME Vannucci in Pistoia of the exhibition Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo (I would like to stay here a little longer). The project enacts a poetic exploration of metamorphic identity, using the body as a sensitive medium through which to activate narratives oscillating between personal memory and collective archetype, belonging and dissolution. The artist’s practice is rooted in that line of female performative photography, from Francesca Woodman to Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta and Claude Cahun, in which the transfiguration of the body becomes a tool to reveal the constitutive processual instability of an identity not regimented by biological or social determinisms.
Erika Pellicci, “Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo”, installation view at Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci
The installation in the gallery’s large vaulted industrial hall appears articulated by three large canvases printed on fabric, designed as semi-permeable diaphragms that, by dividing the space, invite the visitor to pass through a succession of emotional and symbolic rooms. The first, Un posto giusto per nascondere i pensieri (A right place to hide thoughts), shows Erika Pellicci naked and from behind, immersed in a field of tall grass; in the middle one, Il mare di Berlino (The sea of Berlin), the ripples of a water surface blend transparently with the surrounding real architecture, while on the third, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), an enlarged close-up of the artist dominates, whose absorbed face is animated by a contrasting play of light and shadow. These airy and fluctuating supports are bedsheets, the most intimate fabric, the one that grazes the skin guarding the abandonment of bodies in sleep, here a porous membrane on which photography materializes with an alternative tactility compared to the coldness of plexiglass or the neutrality of photographic paper. The artist’s objective is to create a muffled environment, a listening zone amplified by a whispered soundtrack in which breaths, moans, verbal fragments and the lapping of flowing water evoke an immersive dimension of aesthetic experience that invites the viewer to linger and allow themselves to be traversed by visual and sonic suggestions. The fact that the photographs are no longer images to be contemplated frontally but elements of an environment pervaded with suggestions, while maintaining a more rarefied measure, brings her work closer in intent to that of artists like Pipilotti Rist or Janet Cardiff who have made sensory synergy their primary expressive signature.
Erika Pellicci, “Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo”, installation view at Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci
The twenty photographs that compose the exhibition, printed in different formats, all previously unseen and dated 2015-2025, are grouped on the walls of these provisional rooms according to a logic that is not that of chronological or thematic sequence, but of an emotional resonance propagated by their changing dialogue at a distance. Created as a true visual diary, together they compose an archive of metamorphoses in which Pellicci portrays herself with a disorienting transformative capacity: now a body compressed in a room-frame that is too narrow, now an evanescent figure behind veils that filter vision, now a silhouette in backlight reflected in a mirror. The artist’s practice could be defined as one of “self-imaging” devoted to the phenomenological investigation of the plurality of possible selves and of the body understood as a palimpsest on which cultural codes, affective memories and identity phantoms are inscribed. As with Cindy Sherman, in Pellicci too the multiplication of roles responds to an ontological necessity: to show oneself is always to present oneself as other, and to photograph oneself is to construct a fiction more truthful than any imposition of verisimilitude. But where Sherman concentrates on media stereotypes, on clichés of cinema and advertising, Pellicci investigates, in a constant tension between estrangement and belonging, the archetypes of domestic intimacy, the liminal territories between dream, waking, memory, desire and imagination.
Erika Pellicci, “Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo”, installation view at Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci
For biographical reasons as well, in her research the concept of home is a fundamental problematic node: the home as refuge and prison, as physical architecture and psychic construction. Emblematic in this regard is the series Qui sempre. Qui Forse. Qui mai (Here Always. Here Perhaps. Here Never), in which Pellicci documented her own wandering between European cities in search of visual fragments that recalled her original home in the Tuscan countryside. The disorienting effect aroused by these foreign details artificially charged with affective implications is rooted in Freud’s reflection on the uncanny: the home is always also its spectral double, the place where childhood fears nest and where every shadow can become a monster, as confirmed by the phrase “seven specters with clenched teeth squeeze tight under the beds”, an unexpected quote from Stephen King’s It, added in pen by the artist together with the sketched outline of a bed on the black and white printed image of an empty room. The photograph, grainy and layered through the systematic combination of analog and digital procedures, acquires in this way a pictorial, almost dreamlike quality, where the boundaries between real architecture and mental projection dissolve into a psychic nebulousness.
Erika Pellicci, “Uno.. due.. the.. STELLA”, 2015-2025, stampa fotografica su carta Hahnemühle, dibond, 46 x 70 cm, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia
And it is precisely the technical-procedural process that appears crucial to understanding the specificity of Pellicci’s research compared to other related photographic practices: the artist photographs in analog, prints the negatives and then photographs the prints again in digital (without retouching them) to introduce a tangible distance between the moment of the shot and the final image. From this double passage derive the particular grainy texture, chromatic aberrations and blurring that characterize all the works in the exhibition: hairs, dust, imperfections that settle on surfaces are not eliminated but incorporated, becoming a constitutive part of the image and material traces of time. In this way Pellicci distances herself from the obsession with sharpness and resolution that dominates much contemporary art photography: here error is sought, blur is significant, imperfection is poetic. Light, another fundamental element in this research – clear and crystalline in daytime scenes, warm and enveloping in nocturnal ones -is never dramatic or contrasted but always soft, diffused, ductile in shaping volumes without violence. For example, in the diptych Ti voglio bene (I love you), which juxtaposes two naked bodies intertwined in bed and two snails close together on a branch, the light models the skin with a modesty that transforms the erotic scene into an icon of tenderness, a visible manifestation of that shared vulnerability which is perhaps the only authentic form of intimacy. There is no voyeurism in the nude images, no concession to the pleasure of the predatory gaze: instead there is a showing of oneself that demands respect, incompatible with visual consumption. The same formal delicacy also pervades La salita per vedere il panorama (The climb to see the panorama), a black and white photograph of what appears to be a desert canyon (actually the macro of a tiny fragment of clay) on which Pellicci has drawn a minimal human explorer.
Erika Pellicci, “Angela compra le sigarette”, 2015-2025, stampa fotografica su carta Hahnemühle, dibond, 100 x 150 cm, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia
The vulnerability exposed by Pellicci is part of a compositional strategy where seriousness and play, confession and fiction alternate in a rhythm analogous to that of psychic life, with its oscillations between immersion and detachment, presence and absence. For example, in Cadenza mensile (Monthly cadence) the artist portrays herself naked with a heart drawn on her belly with her own menstrual blood, an image that could appear provocatory or disturbing, yet reveals an unexpected beauty, founded on the consideration that menstrual blood is the only blood that is not the consequence of a wound, but of a vital physiological process. The presence of blood and its semantic reversal places Pellicci’s work in the tradition of feminist body art, from Carolee Schneemann to Gina Pane and Orlan, which has made the body an instrument of contestation of cultural impositions on femininity. But where those artists often adopted an aggressive and confrontational register, Pellicci maintains a sweet tone, demonstrating that a non-belligerent but no less radical claim is possible.
Erika Pellicci, “Stanno stretti sotto i letti sette spettri a denti stretti”, 2015-2025, stampa fotografica su carta Hahnemühle, dibond, 70 x 105 cm, courtesy Galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia
Closing the exhibition path, a photograph in which the artist portrays herself in the act of climbing a ladder carrying a black curtain, whose title, Sipario (Curtain), makes explicit the theatrical nature of the entire performative operation, inherent in the fact that every self-portrait is always also a fiction, every confession a rhetorical construction and every intimacy shown a compositional choice. This gesture of unmasking, far from neutralizing the emotional efficacy of the previous images, paradoxically reinforces their authenticity: precisely because they are constructed, meditated and artificial, these photographs succeed in saying something true about the contemporary experience of identity as perpetual performance, about the liquid and metamorphic subjectivity of our times and about that condition of perennial residential and existential transitoriness that the exhibition’s title – Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo – expresses with a conditional formulation in which the aspiration to stasis and the inevitability of change converge. Ultimately, what the exhibition at Galleria ME Vannucci stages is a reflection on the possibility of dwelling, understood as a fundamental mode of being-in-the-world: dwelling in one’s changing body, dwelling in the provisional spaces one passes through, dwelling in the multiple identities one wears and discards, dwelling, finally, in the photographic image, that contradictory place where presence and absence merge into a luminous trace impressed on a sensitive surface. The state of formal grace, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Pellicci’s work, which pervades this body of works affirms the possibility of an art that transforms vulnerability into strength and of a photographic practice that eschews spectacle to construct zones of shared intimacy.
Info:
Erika Pellicci. Mi piacerebbe rimanere qui un po’ più a lungo
30/11/2025 – 16/02/2026
Text by Moira Ricci
Galleria ME Vannucci
Via Gorizia 122, Pistoia
www.mevannucci.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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