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.