Valeria Vavoom, an Italian photographer, explores political and gender issues through her self-portraits, offering a critical view of contemporary society. In some of her works, such as “Family Day,” Secchi reworks the Italian political agenda, contrasting the vision of women promoted by the League. Through an ironic approach, she also criticizes government campaigns such as “Fertility Day,” which sought to influence women to have children using slogans such as “beauty has no age. Fertility does.” The works in the series “Classmates” – which will be exhibited at the Liquida Photofestival in Turin from May 2 to 5 – adopt the stylistic features of advertising and mass communication, offering a provocative response to the stereotypes and homologation processes promoted by the media and politics.

Born in Sardinia in 1990, Valeria Vavoom has focused since 2018 on self-portraiture as a means of artistic investigation, reinterpreting images conveyed by social media, advertising, and mass media. Her photographs question the prevailing aesthetic canons, ironically using common and low-value objects to highlight the emptiness of meaning behind appearance. This operation of deconstructing the mass image aims to highlight the political, economic and gender implications underlying contemporary visual culture.

The series “Classmates” represents a cross-section of contemporary digitized and virtualized society, where everyday experience is filtered through technological devices, transforming the real into consumable content. Images of anonymous schoolgirls, labeled with aggressive stereotypes such as “the geek,” are displayed as if on a “wall of shame,” reflecting the brutality of the spectacularization of everyday life and the lack of a real counterweight to this dominant power.

Courtesy Valeria Vavoom