Hide and Reveal

‘Hide and Reveal’ explores an aesthetic inspired by the ambiguity between showing and hiding, a scenic language in line with an intimate and visceral poetics of the body, made of friction and unfolding, where exposing oneself to the gaze of the Other coexists with a private dimension. The interaction with a computer’s webcam, connected to an external projector, makes the relationship with the audience indirect, diverting attention towards an artificial eye, with the choice of which details to reveal or conceal, which layers of the same reality to show or leave to the imagination.

‘Hide and Reveal’ fits into a context where the boundaries between real and virtual become increasingly blurred and where the concept of ‘transparency’ permeates the discourse on freedom of information. A strong theoretical reference, among others, is precisely “The Transparency Society”, where Byung-Chul Han states that hyper-visibility misses the ‘negativity of what is hidden, inaccessibile and secret’. In this sense, ‘Hide and Reveal’ aims to seek the pleasure of unveiling, of secrecy.

The stage material forms an ever-evolving design, shaping a landscape always composed of traces, remnants of images, and alluding to a hidden dimension, to a space ‘beyond’ the visible. Intimate performative states contrast with the magnified, brutal exposure of reality seen through the lens of the camera, always the direct recipient of the performer. The action is aimed at serving the medium, challenging empathy towards a body that breathes, sweats, exists, in favor of the vulgar, violent immediacy of the image.

‘Playing with equivocation and ambivalence, with mystery and enigma, hightens erotic tension. Transparency or straightforwardness would be the end of eros, that is, pornography’.