At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the Russian term “otstranenie” – written with the spelling mistake of one “n” rather than two – writer and literary critic Viktor Šhklovskij defined what, in his opinion, should be every writer’s task: to free the reader from the automatism of perception, making the object unusual by presenting unprecedented sides of it. Šhklovskij thus came to theorize the “device of estrangement”: “not bringing the meaning close to our understanding, but creating a special perception of the object, to make a ‘vision’ of it, not ‘recognition’” […]

[…] in my view, the work of film-maker, photographer and painter Rosa Foschi cannot be understood without referring to this concept.

Her three professional 35 mm films included in the exhibition at Galleria Il Ponte, Amour du cinéma (1969), Ma femme (1970) and Amore e Psiche (1971), as well as the polaroids created between the end of the 1980s and 90s, bewilder the spectator since they are an agglomeration of elements that together are inhomogeneous, discordant, cacophonic. As such, they produce a sense of surprise, unease in the audience, as it is impossible for them to understand their sense. The filmmaker’s intention is to cause the spectator to go beyond the perceived cacophony to instead try to grasp the presumed ties implied by the elements that make up every image or frame.
The estrangement thus obtained by Rosa Foschi, also with satirical or sarcastic undertones, is hence an experimental technique which, to be decoded, requires particular cultural skills on the part of the observers. The numerous artistic references – from Dalì to Duchamp, Beuys to Magritte, Luca Maria Patella up to Leonardo – are combined with multiple references to literature, film and theatre – for example, to Artaud and Apollinaire –, as well as references to domestic life. But there is no hierarchy in terms of their value: they all equally come together to create a short circuit in the perception of the image, they prompt questions, without, however, giving unequivocal answers. […]

Ilaria Bernardi, Rosa Foschi, or on Estrangement, text in the catalog