Subject, object

Subject, Object addresses prostitution through images of those who practice it and the spaces where it occurs. The project questions the way this reality is represented, perceived, and integrated into our society. The viewer moves between faces and places, traces of a complex phenomenon often reduced to simplified narratives.

Subject shows a sequence of mugshots of people arrested for prostitution. The public exposure of these images on the web reinforces their stigmatization; the homogeneity of the shots erases singularities, making it difficult to empathize with their stories. The gazes elude the camera, escaping the focus that criminalizes them. An audio clip of whispers accompanies the sequence, suggesting an externally imposed guilt.

In Object, the video explores, using Google Street View, public places where prostitution takes place, locations taken from an Italian website.

The application’s cold, mechanical displacements intensify the unease of these marginal and neglected places. In all of them, the same object—a chair, or even a cube serving as a seat—evokes the absence of its inhabitants, bodies displaced in a disposable landscape, a reflection of a system indifferent to the consequences of its own depredation.