The video was made by assembling a sequence of photographs. The main idea is essentially the following: pathologies such as anorexia or bulimia could be interpreted as extreme phenomena of a more general process of social transformation, in which even the most pressing basic needs – such as that of food – undergo such a transfiguration as to be fatally insidious. This tends to occur in modern market economies, whose societies are increasingly and worryingly conditioned by the mass media system and by pervasive and aggressive commodification of every aspect of social life.
The body is increasingly object of attention; a maniacal attention, full of feelings of frustration (mainly video-induced), and deriving from the pressing comparison with unreachable reference models of commercial advertisements.The growing standardization of cultural models and the pernicious influences on the same need for food intersect, along twisted paths, another dominant trend: the reduction of the living spaces traditionally assigned to certain rites and their times, such as the meal, now functional to working time.
Prepackaged meal, canned meat, transgenic soy in cans, microwave, fill the time compression, listening TV’s or radio’s advertisements.
My jewel – which can be seen in the video – links to these considerations in a deliberately provocative way. Starting from wood tongue depressors, I thought of creating a multifunctional pendant able to be used as a “prêt-à-porter” cutlery as well as an aid to induce, if necessary, vomiting.
