Rebecca Moccia Nostalgism

Rebecca Moccia’s new multidisciplinary project explores nostalgia as a characteristic of contemporary anxiety, and its instrumentalisation through neoliberal socio-economic systems. Drawing from personal experience of her own familial and geographic background in the city of Naples and the economic and class divide that historically emerged, and still exists, between the north and south of Italy, Moccia investigates the construction of cultural identity as defined by social and political contexts locally and nationally.

The emergence of nostalgia mirrors the grounding of Western modernisation and the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Its connection to feelings of homesickness began to also represent a longing across physical spaces for those separated from their homelands through migration, labour and military service. Setting aside sentimentality, Moccia exposes how nostalgia is used to govern and direct emotions by evoking idealised histories and driving nationalistic and ideological interests. Moccia proposes alternative readings of nostalgia, which destabilise the narrative of progress by imagining future possibilities that oppose accepted models of power. She adopts a situated perspective, returning to her generational home place to reorient herself with the material and emotional legacies in the site where her worldview was formed. Moccia’s exhibition intentionally complicates embedded layers of cultural and societal nostalgia by unfolding through disjunction and accumulation rather than coherence or closure.

Rebecca Moccia’s recent exhibitions include: Panorama Pozzuoli, Naples (2025); Italian Pavilion, 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024); Mazzoleni, Turin (2023); ICA, Milan (2023); Jupiter Woods, London (2022).

This exhibition is in partnership with Careof, Milan. Moccia’s new moving image work is supported by Collezione Agovino, Naples; WHITESPACE Projects/Napoli; Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Dublin; Careof, Milan.