RES PVBLICA

This body of work is an attempt to analyse how the spectacular participates in the exercise of power in the context of Italian televisual entertainment. I photographed sets of the greatest italian commercial broadcaster, located in Milan and Rome.

My approach was to photograph these places using a large format camera, because I wanted to show the specific optical effects of these imposing decors. Their hyper-baroque structures, which accumulate elements connoting wealth, their saturated hues and flooding lights, serve to immerse the shows’ participants and audiences in visions of excess. I believe such environments are constructed with the aim of de-subjectivising viewers, that is to say leading them to loose a sense of individuality rooted in real-life experiences. We may see in this form of hyper-spectacle the counterpart, in the postmodern Italian age, of the “panem et circenses” behind Roman spectator sports. This ancient political strategy consisted in providing the people with games to secure their unquestioning approval. Ultimately, these devices for the exercise of power alienate television audiences by supplanting their subjective reality with the invasive spectacle of a self-contained pseudo-world.

My approach seeks to suggest a critical reading of entertainment in our society, by looking into some of the ideas developed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in “What is an apparatus?“. I chose a photographic type of representation for its ability to pause the frenetic pace of televisual images. I wanted to provide viewers with images that allow an analysis of these shows’ mise en scène, or behind the scenes, which is the same since hyper-spectacle relies on surface appearances. I have enacted, in Agamben’s sense, a profanation of these apparatuses’ controlled and domineering appearance. For Agamben, to profane signifies to return something to common usage and give it back to the people. Res Pvblica is my attempt to envision ways of re-appropriating these apparatuses, and thus resist the desubjectivising process they generate.