For the first solo exhibition in Italy by poet and artist Roberta Marrero (1972–2024), Camera Doppia presents a selection of works on paper produced over nearly two decades, moving between visual poetry, drawing, and collage. Marrero’s practice draws from her biographical experience as well as from literature, pop culture, and political thought, addressing themes of desire, religion, identity, and resistance.
Working through a form of bricolage, she assembles heterogeneous elements from different sources, confusing the plane of signification and creating space for a personal and political urgency: to sabotage the capitalist bourgeois order of things. Her use of confessional poetics operates as both introspection and social inquiry, while refusing any pre-constituted identity, artistic language, or stylistic category.
The exhibition unfolds within a site-specific installation by Jermaine Gallacher, conceived as a domestic space that enhances both the fragility and the political commitment of Marrero’s work. Adopting the figure of the bricoleur, Gallacher constructs an environment shaped by layered tensions, where everyday objects and collected materials form a disordered yet expressive composition.
Across the works, autobiographical and imaginary dimensions merge, addressing self-definition as a queer and trans subject, alongside homoeroticism, religious belief, and desire. Through processes of appropriation and re-signification, Marrero empties out dominant symbols and re-codes them within a queer, trans, and iconoclastic imaginary.
Birds with a Broken Heart is organized in collaboration with Inés Plasencia and Víctor Mora Gaspar, with curatorial assistance by Guglielmo Benassi, and interior design assistance by Gabriella Massey, Ben Burgis, Thomas Britain McGovern, and Massimo Faion. On April 29 at 6 pm, Camera Doppia will host Todo era por ser fuego, a choral, multi-voiced poetry reading performance curated by Daria Persia and Sandra Cane.