About
Elena Mocchetti (Legnano, 1978) is an Italian artist and photographer whose practice lies at the intersection of documentary photography, video, and participatory practices. She studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and within the research group of DAStU at Politecnico di Milano. She has developed an artistic practice that intertwines contemporary art, social research, and territorial investigation, in dialogue with cultural institutions, universities, and social organisations. Her work generally originates from public institutional commissions or from privately co-funded commissions.
Her research develops through long-term projects devoted to observing vulnerable human ecosystems, marginalised communities, and environmental and social transformations within the contemporary urban context. Through analogue photography, video, installations, and relational processes, Mocchetti’s practice builds, over time, a visual archive of the transformations of the present.
Her main research projects include Nafta (2019–2020), an investigation into migration routes and systems of agricultural exploitation between Italy and North Africa; The Weary Goat (2018–2020), focused on the informal settlements of Roma communities in Milan; Il Santo Il Matto Il Fiume (2019–2022), developed in collaboration with seven psychiatric rehabilitation communities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; and the more recent Io Abito (2024–2028), a photographic and video project exploring the relationship between natural and social ecosystems.
The poetics that emerge from this practice take shape as a process in which Art and Imagination enter into a direct relationship with the reality we experience every day, in an attempt to reconsider and bear witness to the power dynamics of the systems that inevitably influence and shape us, through a vision of beauty that must be sought in the Nature of Things.
Her work has been presented at institutions and exhibition spaces in Italy and abroad, including GAMEC, Bergamo; Arsenal, Berlin; Arsenale Nord, Venice; and CAM, Milan. In 2023 she received the Arte Laguna Prize in the Video section, and in 2026 the Wandering Species Award, promoted by Connecting Cultures and Regione Lombardia.