Massimiliano Rossetto: FEROCE

Throbbing, pulsing, rushing, seeping—FEROCE renders the Verzasca Valley not as passive landscape, but as sensual terrain: a site of soft uprising against the fiction of a pure, straight, sexless nature. Images and objects emerge from Rossetto’s deep, ancestral engagement with the valley, troubling the borders between self and earth, observer and organism. Through scent, surface, and the haptic logic of touch, Rossetto conjures an encounter with the imposing mountainscape of Ticino, Switzerland. His artistic practice reveals a vitality in ecological life that slips past the rigid binaries humans try to impose. FEROCE gestures toward queer ecology not as metaphor, but as methodology: messy, interdependent, contaminated.

The title itself twitches across tongues and meanings—between fierce and ferocious, brutal and vital. Words that so often serve as stand-ins for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the Other. But Rossetto draws the valley nearer, describing and documenting nature with heightened intimacy. The valley becomes not just a place, but a subject. A lover. A refusal. And above all, FEROCE.

With the generous support of:
Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council
standard/deluxe
City of Lausanne
Canton of Vaud
Loterie Romande