Yvonne De Rosa / Lost in Refound Memory

By Dolores Pulella

Yvonne De Rosa, born in Naples in 1975, has been dealing with the theme of memory for years in a process of reconstructing narratives through images that without her work would remain hidden by time.

After graduating in political science, the photographer left Italy spending fifteen years abroad, in London where she studied photography at the prestigious Central Saint Martins school, and then obtained a master’s degree in photo-journalism at the London College of Communication. She returned to her hometown in 2015, where she founded Magazzini Fotografici, a space of 200 square meters completely dedicated to photography, in the heart of the historic center of Naples in the ancient Palazzo Caracciolo d’Avellino, once home to the Ines handbag factory.

Today Magazzini is a space that hosts exhibitions, workshops, book presentations but it is also a promotion platform for emerging artists, as well as a supporter of social activities. A project by Yvonne De Rosa that goes togethere with Magazzini Fotografici is Archivio Magazzini, its first venture – Chapter One – opened in 2018 with an exhibition that displayed photographs portraying celebrities from the fifties in Naples, taken from a series of 10,000 negatives found in a box that belonged to an anonymous photographer of the time, which have been restored and digitized. The goal is to create an archive available to the community that is also a tool that would make available knowledge for students, artists, researchers and enthusiasts.

At the same time, Yvonne De Rosa continues her personal and subtle photographic research that activates links that make past and present interact. This seems to be a distinctive feature of her work starting with the “Crazy God” series, which was published in a monograph, and was the subject of an exhibition at the PAN, Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, in 2007. The shots are the result of the idea of the photographer that thought to return to the place where she had volunteered in the early nineties, a psychiatric hospital, which is now an abandoned building. The portraits of the objects scattered in the empty rooms and corridors communicate with their discreet presence the absence but also the suffering of the former residents, which is allso well conveyed by the poetics of the dilapidated and abandoned architecture. Although few elements of the past identity remain, De Rosa highlights the space making it testimony of its own experience, and calibrating the lights and shadows that let the shots speak for themselves.

Thanks to this work, the photographer was awarded the International Photography Award and received recognition from the World Health Organization. If in general De Rosa’s research is based on traces of the recovery of lost memories of others, with the series “Wish List” (2011) the investigation is conducted on her own memory, on the fantastic reworking of everyday life.

With “Hidden Identities: Unfinished” the artist shifts her perspective back to the other and otherness by collaborating with the British non-governmental association “Hope and Homes for Children”; the project was created to give a voice through photography to those who, despite living in conditions of hardship and poverty, maintain great dignity. “I don’t think the country of origin of the people portrayed matters, I see only one race, the human race, and I try to point out how important it is to keep in mind that living conditions in the world are not equally distributed”, said the photographer herself. , underlining how the title “Unfinished” makes it clear that the work is not finished because it did not show all the places where she worked, but focused on the realities of Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Closer to her heritage is “Terra Mia”, the series of photographs taken as a condemnation of that part of Campania that we have known for years with the name “Terra dei fuochi” or “triangle of death”, in which due to the illegal spill of toxic waste by the organized crime, the pollution has become such that it’s caused an exponential increase in cancer cases among the locals. The photos, in black and white, also clearly document the degradation that characterizes this reality, left abandoned and controlled by the underworld.

“Albania available for rent” is one of those projects in which De Rosa mixes images of the past together with images of the present that, through the artist’s mediation, gives back to us the history of a nation and its people, scarred by the terrible dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, the consequences of which have dragged on over time. This series of shots is also characterized by the desire to give voice to a slice of forgotten history, to a corner of the world close to ours, a European reality but one that for forty years has lived another history; Hence the landscapes in which nature, concrete, and sheet metal wrecks mix to create a desolate and bare panorama.

In recent years, De Rosa has told, always by mixing past and present, love stories that ended tragically that temporally belong to the early decades of the twentieth century, but which always bring with them current themes. With “Negativo 1930” she tells the story of Nina, a girl from a town in Campania during the thirties who fell in love with Peppino, a fisherman. Once the young woman told her boyfriend that she was pregnant, she was brutally killed, strangled by him, who abandoned her body at the mercy of the sea. Nina was found after two weeks, completely hairless due to the sea water, and when the police told about the girl’s pregnancy to the family, her father decided to disown her, as a result of this she was not granted a funeral, and her body was moved to an ossuary.

Although Peppino was found guilty and arrested, Nina’s family erased her from their memory, but her tragic story made her talk again when a niece, the nine-year-old Anna, who had never known her, began to have visions. in which a bald and naked woman appeared to her. In addition, many locals claimed to see Nina’s ghost wandering around the town. Many masses were celebrated to try to put an end to the visits by the spirit of the woman, and it would seem that after countless prayers, Nina’s ghost disappeared forever. De Rosa has brought this story back to life through a photographic work carried out in the village where the facts unfolded, interviewing the locals, first of all Anna, Nina’s niece, and documenting the places of the apparitions of the young woman’s ghost. The result is a series of photographs in ultraviolet tones, which give the impression of being true negatives, and which in addition to the key scenarios of the story, also document the artist’s personal interpretation of the events.

With “Negativo 1930” Yvonne De Rosa participated in the International Biennial of Photography Photolux Festival in Lucca, and in Les Rencontres International de la Photographie in Arles in 2019 with an exhibition at the Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz curated by Enrico Stefanelli and Laura Nobile, director of the LA Noble Gallery in London.