SELECTED WORKS

IRMA VEP

“People took the silence of the movies for granted because they never quite lost the feeling that what they saw was after all only pictures.”^[1]

Irma Vep is one of the earliest femme fatales – or vamps, a contraction of vampire, of which the name Irma Vep is an anagram – in the history of cinema. Portrayed by the actress Musidora, she is a cat suit-wearing burglar in the silent crime serial film “Les Vampires” (1915) written and directed by Louis Feuillade. She initially inspired the surrealists^[2] and later filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, who created a film (1996) and then a TV series (2022) titled “Irma Vep.” Both of these works are metanarrative pieces that attempt to reenact the original serial, with the actress, in the first case, wearing a black vinyl catsuit purchased from a sex shop.

Irma Vep is an alter ego of the artist Eleonora Roaro, based on interviews with professional dorminatrices (“pro dommes” for short) active between Milan and Turin. She is a collective character that allows a reflection on sex work, fetishism, desire, and images in contemporary society, in an “onlife^[3]” dimension where the boundaries between online and offline are increasingly blurred. With her latex catsuit and glossy boots, Irma Vep is a virtual image that embodies fetishistic and sadomasochistic (SM) impulses. As Arnheim wrote a few years after the invention of sound films, in silent cinema – which operates exclusively through images – sight is the main sense^[4]. Therefore, silent film offers the opportunity to explore the connection between images and fetishism, as well as fetishism for images. “The fetish would be entirely like a symbol, but similar to an impressed and fixed plane, an impressed image, a photograph to which one would always return^[5].”

Irma Vep is a performance that allows us to consider SM practices as a cultural performance: they stage power dynamics that can simultaneously draw from and disavow their social referents^[6]. Sexual relationships, much like political relationships, are perceived as power struggles, with the peculiarity that, in the case of SM, these positions are interchangeable, as gender roles are^[7].

Irma Vep is an exhibition composed of three works: a video (“Irma Vep”), in which the narrative is conveyed through text as in the intertitles of the silent era; an IoT^[8] sculpture titled “@irmavep_nowhere”, a 3D printed replica of the boot worn in the video, that lights up in pink when users and Irma Vep – within the ambiguity of whether she is a physical person or a bot – interact with each other on Telegram; and an Instagram filter (“Irma’s Heels”) that allows the shiny 3D boot model to be placed anywhere in the world.

Eleonora Roaro, “Irma Vep”

Single-channel video | 5’54’’

3840 × 2160 UHD 16:9 | Silent

Edition 3 + AP | 2023

Camera and DOP: Marco Brianza

Costume: Francesca Mulè

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Eleonora Roaro, “@irmavep_nowhere”

IoT sculpture (3D printing in PLA, microcontroller Arduino, pink LED strip)

23x8x25 cm | edition 3 + 2 PA | 2023

NeRF scanning and 3D model optimization: Alessandro Passoni

3D printing + IoT: Marco Brianza

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^[1] Rufolf Arnheim, Film as Art (University of California Press, 1957), p. 33.

^[2] Annette Förster, Women in Silent Film: Histories of Fame and Fate (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 211.

^[3] Luciano Floridi, The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era (Springer Cham, 2015), pp. 7–13.

^[4] Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 33.

^[5] Gilles Deleuze, Sadismo e masochismo (Edizioni IOTA, 1973), p. 30. [translation of the author]

^[6] Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 17.

^[7] Antonio Monegal, “Reading Sade: A Philosophy of Freedom” in Sade: La Libertat o El Mal (CCCB, 2023), p. 132.

^[8] Internet of Things

Text by the artist.

Vanishing Point

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), one of Land Art’s most emblematic works, is located on the Rozel Point peninsula on the northeast side of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This site, characterised by its pinkish hues, contains oil deposits that have been tried to be extracted for decades, in vain. The installation remained underwater for thirty years; as Goeff Dyer states in White Sands, visitors continued to go there despite there being nothing to see. In 2002, drought made the work visible again.

In the video-performance Vanishing Point (2019), the camera is positioned next to the last stone of the Spiral Jetty. Eleonora Roaro walks from that point towards the lake until she disappears underwater, as has long been the case with Smithson’s work. The distance travelled is an anthropometric form of measurement that reveals an ongoing process of desertification, climate change and entropy.

Roaro’s work points to how the climate crisis and drastic rise in temperatures in recent years are causing the lake to dry out—probably completely in the near future if the situation doesn’t change, according to research carried out by Utah State University (2020). Vanishing Point also keeps alive the memory of Smithson’s early preoccupation with, as well as activism regarding, environmental issues.