Since 2002 Valerio Rocco Orlando has worked on a number of community-based projects, creating different cycles of installations focused on the relationship between individual and collective identity. His first project (The Sentimental Glance, 2002-2007) is a seven-channel video installation built like a stratified Bildungsroman populated by the portraits of six young women on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, passion and loneliness, melancholy, maternity and androgyny. As art critic Caroline Corbetta has said,
"Emotions and beauty are the weapons of Valerio Rocco Orlando’s utopia. The erudite aesthetic component of his works is not a sterile exercise in style but a necessary instrument (revolutionary?) of communication and participation. In his case, beauty is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a ‘Self’ and an ‘Other’... Beauty and emotion imply an idea of movement: interior but also towards the 'Other'. Though he rapidly shifted from cinematography to art, in reality Valerio Rocco Orlando has continued to “do” cinema in the etymological sense of the term: indeed, kinema means movement. Entering the space sketched out by one of his video installations implies not only the movement of vision, but also of bodies and emotivity".[6]
Dealing with themes such as the relationship between artists and society (The Reverse Grand Tour, 2012), the feelings of newer generations towards folklore (Bisiàc, 2007), the exchanges between a couple (Lover’s Discourse, 2010)[7] and within a school as an institution (What Education for Mars?, 2011-2013). Orlando carries out a personal exploration of portraiture, using the activities of meeting and dialogue as tools.[8] By defining art as a process of analysis and mutual knowledge, Valerio Rocco Orlando explores and tells everyday life stories, taken from personal and social context, recomposing them as the pieces of a mosaic within an image of the whole.[9]
"In order to investigate a universal theme, Valerio Rocco Orlando thinks, builds, and weaves relationships with the other, in such a direct and essential way that the artist’s main medium become the encounter itself. Einfülhung, what German philosophers refer to as empathy, is both a prerequisite and a direct consequence of the methodology of Orlando. Conceiving the production as a long-term process based on trust and intimacy, the audience gets to feel the other, participating in his points of view and feelings, by mirroring and questioning their own experience. Only through this new exchange with the viewer the research is completed and the artwork can respond to its function of radical education".[10]
Valerio Rocco Orlando's latest work (Dialogue with the Unseen, 2019) is a spiritual pilgrimage and a political journey to the Holy Land. Starting from a collaboration with Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, this video installation is a collection of encounters between individuals who are questioning their own relationships with Nature and Society.[11]
