Over the last ten years, video has become a privileged terrain of visual experimentation for women artists. The reasons are manifold, ranging from the medium’s specific qualities—its flexibility and relatively recent origin, and thus its lack of burdensome ties to a patriarchal tradition—to the virtually limitless potential it offers for ‘recording’ both external and internal reality and transforming it into visual imagination. Valentina Coccetti’s video work fits into this context both for her experimental and varied use of the medium (painting and Letraset on film, animation on paper, découpage, Super 8 and digital) and for the themes explored, particularly in her more recent works (personal narrative and family history).

The scratched drawings on the film in her early videos—Maracanà (1997), Due passi (1998), Trailer (1999), Festa mobile (1999)—form puzzles of constantly shifting images, with rapidly moving fragments giving life to a forest of signs and to a personal, intimate visual vocabulary. This allows the artist to deeply explore the expressive potential of the moving image and to craft a language rich in visual and perceptual stimuli. In Souvenir (2000), the artist draws from a broad repertoire of stylized images: flowers, abstract forms, cars, bicycles, and human figures alternate with a pressing visual rhythm, in sync with the sound of a speeding train. The same rhythm dominates Countdown (2000), where the frantic succession of numbers from a digital clock seems to match the din of traffic from the square below, evoking a time detached from any orderly chronological flow.

Oh Valentina (2000) and Il monte dei cocci (2001) mark a stylistic and aesthetic shift. The central theme in Oh Valentina is a journey backward into childhood, evoked by a child’s voice reciting a Pascoli poem and by the camera leading the viewer up the stairs of the elementary school Coccetti once attended. The filming pace has eased from the syncopated cadence of earlier works, adapting instead to the slow tempo of memory. Through a physical and symbolic exploration, the camera brings the past into the present via the few remaining traces: a poem, a classroom, and a black-and-white photograph.

The video Il monte dei cocci, part of a broader installation, is composed like a three-movement score, whose main character is the artist’s grandfather. Accompanied by his granddaughter, he slowly climbs a narrow path to the top of a hill, where his initiatory journey of knowledge ends with a vision of drawings hung from the branches of a tree—drawings he himself made. The motion impressed by the artist seems to breathe life into them, just as the grandfather’s voice revives old, forgotten nursery rhymes. What dominates here is a feeling of communion, expressed not only through the conventional paths of language but also through gestures, glances, and songs.

In Valentina Coccetti’s stylistic research, the video medium becomes a language that gives body and motion to her lyrical sensibility, always in harmony with her existential narrative.
— Maria Rosa Sossai