Up-Close is a performative and visual inquiry into the body and its mediated representation. The project explores how the body becomes an aesthetic surface, an object of desire, a communicative tool, a product of consumer, and visual material through a choreographic language drawn from soft-core pornography, codified poses, and close-up video that fragments the body's unity. The performance moves between reality and representation, intimacy and spectacle, eroticism and sublimation. On stage, the body becomes a site of tension between its physical presence and its fragmentation into image, between being and appearing. Each movement, gesture, or pose references a codified visual language: stretching, yoga, and plastic poses evoke practices of wellness and spirituality, but also the aesthetics of fashion and advertising. The "soft-pornographic" gestures suggest an erotic code that is mediated, filtered, implied, and never explicit. Can we still trace the origin of a gesture when every visual code is now hybridized and contaminated, does gesture have a singular and specific origin?
The performance uses live video capture, close-ups, frame shifts, and background changes to deconstruct the image of the body, which never appears in full but is instead constructed and recomposed through a fabricated visual imaginary, through perspectives and fragments. Each image reveals part of the physical and symbolic identity of the body's actions, behaviors, and gestures, building a layered and mutable imaginary. The questions How is the identity of a body perceived through fragmentation? How is a behavior, attitude, or gesture identified and recognized through which elements and processes of associations? Mediation is not merely a technical process, but also a cultural one: the gaze of the camera (lime the human’s one) imposes an aesthetic, a frame, a rhythm, a point of view. Visual influences derive from music videos, commercials, fashion films, soft pornography, and social media each with its own conventions, ideals, and representational modes. The performative body adapts to, resists, or conforms to these codes, becoming a surface for collective projection.
The performance becomes a space where intimacy is exposed but also constructed, idealized protected by the very artifice of representation. The tension between the reality of the body and the mimesis of gesture collapses the boundary between the lived body and the represented one: what happens on stage is real, but also constructed, coded, idealized, and repeated. In this sense, the physical body transforms into a mediated, idealized, iconized body observed and constructed through the camera's gaze and a cultural visual imaginary.
The project investigates the perception of bodily identity in relation to media, digital, modern representation and performance context, raising questions around the spectator's role, the power of the gaze, and the cultural construction of bodily languages. Up-Close does not aim to present a "real" body, but rather operates at the threshold between presence and artifice, between physicality and visual imaginary questioning where these visual codes, languages, and bodily identities come from, and how they exist as cultural and aesthetic constructions. The body became a product of consumer just like the « consumer products » the body pose for. (Fashion, commercial spots, publicity, …)