Works
Illustrations
Writing
CV
Text, print on A3 paper
Sound installation, loop 3’ 50’’
2024
FOR FANS OF BEAUTY & FAST HEARTBEATS is born out of a reflection on the datafication, commodification and alienation of bodies in capitalist societies with a focus on pornography and online culture.
The work revolves around cardiophilia, a fetish characterized by a deep fascination with the heartbeat and more generally the cardiovascular system’s anatomy, physiology and diseases. This online community is composed of thousands of users worldwide producing and sharing videos and audio recordings of their own heartbeat in many different situations. The technologies used to record the pulses originate from the medical world, ranging from simple stethoscopes to more elaborate systems like ECG monitors that visualize the heartbeats in the form of cardiograms. Cardiophilia is a peculiar combination of biopolitics and internet culture. Listening to one’s own heartbeat is a strategy for producing the self: the sound, vibrating from and through the body, gives the listener a feeling of em- bodiment. Cardiophiliacs, captivated by this grounding sensation, try through many different means to progressively get closer to themselves, guided both by a sexual, romantic fascination for the heart and a desire for control and ownership over their own body. The alienation between the heartbeat and its owner, and the pleasure that comes from filling the gap of this perceived distance, is a big element of the cardiophiliac fetish.
What the work brings to light is how the condition of alienation from one own’s body that characterizes cardiophiliacs is not relegated to this specific community, but it serves as a mirror of the fundamental alienation that characterizes bodies in the digital space of a capitalistic word, particularly in an age of “data colonialism”. To this avail, the work focuses on a very specific type of cardiophiliac content, that is, when cardiophilia moves into the realm of “mainstream” porn. Here, the fetish’s potentially disruptive imaginary is appropriated and domesticated: through its pornification, sexual impulses and bodily desires are further commodified.
The sound installation and the text have been extracted from a porn website that exclusively sells videos of young female models in the act of recording their heartbeats or having them recorded by an off-camera male hand, described in the titles as a “doctor”. The language labeling the videos, the settings, all of it mimics and perpetuates mainstream porn tropes: the stethoscope stands for a penis, held by a faceless man, or, in the case of “self-stething”, for a dildo; the camera is voyeur- istic, detached and disembodied; of the models, we know only where they come from (Brazil, Russia, Italy, France...), their ages and names; their bodies are shav- en, shiny, sterile, and are described as “hot”, “sexy”, “naughty”; their heartbeats too are labeled as “beautiful”. The videos and the clean, professionally recorded heart beats can be acquired for prices ranging between 10 and 25 US dollars each. While in most of the videos from the online cardiophiliac community the body that is filmed is also filming, in charge of its image, here the models are reduced to mere objects. Their voices are silenced, while their hearts beat, pumping money and value.
The work consists of a text and sound installation made with a selection and collage of material from the online community, juxtaposing the language from the porn videos to the symphony of anonymous, abstracted heartbeats.
* THE PAIN OF OTHERS (2024)
* HOW TO FIND YOU INNER VOICE (2024)
* FOR FANS OF BEAUTY AND FAST HEARTBEATS (2024)
* THAT WHICH IS NEVER SEEN FROM THE EARTH (2023)
* IL MOSTRO NON HA LINGUA (2022)