Trashissima takes shape from photographs Kourtney Roy made while travelling through Italy in 2024. Rather than treating the country as a repository of monuments or picturesque views, Roy approaches it as an immense ready-made film set. Ancient columns, roadside architecture and less reputable interiors occupy the same theatrical register, becoming locations for a cast of deliberately disreputable characters performed by the artist herself.
The pictures arise through improvisation rather than advance planning. Roy travels with a compact repertoire of wigs, coloured stockings, extravagant clothes and a lightweight tripod, selecting locations as she encounters them. This practical method gives the work its peculiar tension: each image is carefully staged, yet remains dependent on chance meetings between costume, pose and place. Italy is neither neutral background nor documentary subject. Its cultural grandeur and everyday vulgarity are materials within the fiction.
Roy’s self-portraits turn the familiar conventions of travel photography inside out. The tourist becomes actress, director and unreliable souvenir-maker; the holiday album slips toward melodrama, parody and the surreal. The title’s exaggerated Italian flourish establishes the book’s register, while its mock-family-entertainment tone sharpens the contrast between cherished memories and the unruly figures inhabiting them. Humour is central, but it does not dissolve the precision with which Roy examines performance, femininity and the manufacture of photographic identity.
Published by André Frère éditions as a 48-page leporello, Trashissima gives this serial logic a physical form. The unfolding sequence encourages the photographs to be read as linked scenes rather than isolated tableaux, preserving the momentum of Roy’s shifting personae and locations. For collectors concerned with contemporary self-portraiture and the photobook as an edited object, its significance lies in that close fit between subject, method and structure: an Italian itinerary recast as a compact, knowingly excessive theatre of identities.
