intimacy
Self-explanatory in the past, today the concept of intimacy is actually an increasingly undetermined and porous term. For many, intimacy means solitude, heightened vulnerability
and nakedness, something to hide because condemnation or mockery is expected, something that sometimes involves the other and sometimes not. Intimacy is a space that excludes the outside because there is no need for the outside or there
is a resistance to opening up to another and sharing something personal and private.
Often, the first association related to the notion of intimacy is the naked body and/or sexual act, especially when it refers to sexual practices that are widely considered socially weird or even deviant and thus undesirable. It is
certain that the primacy of these associations over the others
is wholeheartedly promoted by the media, which construct their commercial nature and profitability by publishing such content. But for most people, intimacy seems to be an entirely individual, particular, deeply solitary practice or
behavior or act that we see as our weakness, as something worthy of condemnation or ridicule, as something we are ashamed of, as something where we are soft and thin, vulnerable and fragile.
At the same time, what will be considered intimacy at all becomes more a matter of personal decision, and less a matter of social consensus, and it is also individual to what extent and whether one will be ready to share their intimacy
with others. Viewed through the prism of media and social networks, precisely the contents that brings intimate to the light of day attract the greatest attention, ranging from posting photos of bedrooms and contents of closets or
toiletries of celebrities to private videos of sexual content recorded by persons known to the general public, but also by persons completely unknown. This necessarily raises the question of whether certain behavior or action is truly
intimate if one is willing to share it with others? On the one hand, we have the remnants of tacit social agreement about what is intimate, private,
and what should not be touched. On the other hand, on a daily basis, we are exposed to situations where we witness one’s intimacy, presented to the public, sometimes with the knowledge and consent of the people involved, sometimes not.
Only if we choose to completely give up on following all the media and not to participate in any social network (and sometimes not even then), we will be confronted with someone’s intimacy or “intimacy”. In this sense, intimacy has become
trivialized and banalized, something that can be used for self-promotion, something that can easily be “packed and sold”, and which represents a practice that directly or indirectly affects the interpersonal relations and the level of
intimacy which is (non-)achieved in them.
This project asks the question of what intimacy is today, what are its features and boundaries, and above all how much it is possible for intimacy to remain intimate, and whether it is possible at all, in the presence of an observer? The
key to approach to individual works is contained in the project name itself, and it is clear to the observer within which reference field they move. However, comprehension, understanding, and experiencing intimacy is individual, which
opens up space for non-stereotypical interpretations and possibly unexpected interpretative situations. Specifically, a naked body is also an expected and frequent representation when the concept of intimacy is mentioned but is the same
applicable to a representation of a broken plate or a face that is seemingly buried in a cake? Here the observer necessarily faces the question of what intimacy is to him/her and to what extent this is an individual or universal concept.
What are the characteristics that a behavior or action must possess in order to be perceived as intimate?
To what extent and to what limit is intimacy determined by its actors, and to what extent
does the observer decide?
The absence of a specific name for each work and the use of a number instead of a name, on the one hand, evokes the previously described trivialization of intimacy, suggests its “usualness”, predictability, familiarity, but at the same
time opens the space of interpretative freedom. The numbers are devoid of all content, they are themselves stripped (just like the intimacy itself), the numbers do not refer to anything, they do not build on anything but themselves, the
numbers are silent and they leave it to the observer to encode the meaning they want in what they see. At the same time, the use of black and white and a close-up of the content presented serves to highlight precisely the above issues,
i.e. to narrow the focus of the observer and concentrate on the main contents of the work, only a part of the “wider story”. This “snapshot” approach contrasts with the aforementioned media practices that sometimes even serialize all the
details and specifics of one’s intimacy. Here, the observer is left to, conditionally speaking, fill in the parts of the “story” that are not shown and thus get an opportunity to reexamine their own definition of intimacy.
This procedure also raises the question of what is the limit that determines when an observer ceases to be an observer and becomes a voyeur. The common definition of a voyeur is that this is a person who likes to observe others when they
do not know and/or do not want to be seen.
It is important to notice here that paradoxically, the very act of voyeurism is an intimate act,
that is, an act that implies solitude, fear of condemnation, something that is hidden and not shared with others.
In a wider sense, following any media content or social media presence today has made us all reluctant voyeurs, and this raises the question of the extent to which frequent witnessing of other people’s intimacy desensitized us, or perhaps
liberated us, in the sense that we feel less shame or guilt over our own intimate practices? The reaction that the observer feels when watching another’s intimacy speaks of him or her at least as much as the content of the work speaks of
the actor of the intimacy act presented. It is precisely this mutual nakedness that is the starting point and the endpoint of this project.