A face stares at us, unmoving, always identical to itself. A perfect body constantly taking on a different identity: the identity we wish to give to it. The passer-by stops to muse over the smooth curves of this other being standing opposite him, silently confronting him: the mannequin. In the reflection of the glass its face merges with the that of the passer-by, with our own.

In the chain of production and consumption our day embodies, the mannequin plays the role of the bait. Its perfect features remind us of a dream dreamt a few nights before, which faded at our awakening. Now, in the safe yet intimate distance of the window, we can again experience the relationship with a being both familiar, identical, and endlessly new. Its clothes, the multi-coloured softness of its disguises, its sham hairdos all enchant us because we know they are only transitory and will have changed tomorrow.

This being similar to us, which speaks and hears not, is there only to be shown to us. It flatters our imagination through what is the less chaste of senses: sight. We desire what we see, and desire even more what we know we cannot possess. It is the desire of what we don’t have, of the impossible relationship with a plastic body, which eventually pushes us to buy the robe embracing the doll’s unknown body. The mysterious love between us and the dream finds its consummation in this act of recognition and impossible embrace. Once the merchandise is bought, once the mannequin is undressed, once the desire is fulfilled, the grey road continues to unfold ahead of us. We know that the mannequin will be different tomorrow because its dress will be different. Perhaps, on the way home, we will stop again in front of its show case to let it embody the love we dreamt of.

The idea of experiencing something in view of more fuller, more coloured, bigger experiences scans the rhythms of modern life. The more we consume, the more we feel the need to consume, the faster we loose interest in what we previously perceived to be indispensable. Drowning in this stream of disposable emotions, we continuously search for a way to reach to the shore, our unreachable Ithaca: the ultimate fulfilment of every desire. Relationships – the sudden meeting of a new person and the subsequent end of our passion for her – are only the ultimate stages in this endless search for a goal. As the imperfect children of evolutionist theories and of faith in the progressive destiny of human kind, we still believe in the existence of a superior niche of heroes and gods, perfect races and men free of poverty. In fact, we are cog-wheels in a never-ending marketing activity which while also economic, is primarily an existential marketing; and its aim is to possess more than what was before.

La Traviata is a work which marks the disenfranchisement of the new bourgeois opera from the old elitist music. It approaches the consummation of passion and the search for eternal and perfect love with an inescapable pictorial and musical strength. No longer a story of men and women who meet each other, it represents the mise en scene of our very own dilemma. It tells the story of a woman, Violetta, who while wandering in the emporium of disposable passions finally meets her long-awaited goal: supposed liberation from the unstoppable cycle of beginnings and ends, eternal love. Until this moment Violetta – just like the passer-by facing the mannequin – was experiencing the ignoto amor (unknown love), a mysterious and haughty feeling which is both the doom and solace of modern mankind. The exchange between Violetta and Alfredo in the first act of La Traviata obsessively repeats these concepts: first the unknown mystery, then the recognition, the torture and delight of love. The moment of recognition, the moment when the Idea is embodied in a real person (… he is the one whom my soul, lonely in the tumult, loved to imagine in secrecy …– … che l’anima solinga ne’ tumulti godea sovente pingere …”) marks the passage from the world of ideas (i.e. the mannequin) to reality.

The question we face, and through which we measure the firmness of our love dream, is whether it will survive the corrosion of time, and out desire to possess yet another love. Is it possible to picture the end of desire, that imperceptible moment in which one passes from the everlasting promise of love to the urge to destroy it, to consume love in a frenzy in order to be able to long for a vaster, purer and more intact one? Can we describe the shadow-line between the delight and the agony of a love relationship?

In order to avoid censorship, Verdi suggested the title of ‘Love and Death’ for his work. What death is Verdi referring to? Violetta’s physical death or the moral death of Love itself? Both death and love are a means through which men escape the cog-wheels of mercification and the forced consummation of experiences. At the same time, precisely because love and death enable us to stop this mechanism, there is a constant attempt to transform them in consumer products. Death itself is no longer an intimate and solitary experience, but an event which thousands of people attend. The public remembrance of the dead, funeral rallies and patriotic hymns about the war dead are a proof that death, just like love, is continuously offered to us in take-away portions: it is sold, peddled one might say. Death becomes a funfair.

Every day of our lives we fall preys to the question which stops Violetta on the threshold and us before the mannequin: (What should I do? Revel in the whirpool of earthly pleasures. I must pass madly from joy to joy? ) Che far degg’io? Gioire, di voluttà nei vortici perire. Folleggiare di gioia in gioia per i sentieri del piacere? But there, on the boundary, a voice is perhaps calling us from behind the mannequin. It is Alfredo’s voice: (Love is the very breath of the universe itself) Amor, amor è palpito dell’universo intero. Can we stop the cycle of consummation and search of new passions? In the never-ending conflict of this question La Traviata and Verdi await us on the way.

At first a doll is playfulness and consumption; then it becomes a relic and memory; finally, it goes back to being playfulness and consumption: a body made of plastic, an act of impossible intimacy, which denies the mysterious love intervening between ourselves and dreams. The doll is a purgatory of souls that have been made into objects awaiting the miracle of regeneration, cyclical time, the disappearance of all theory of instrumental value there where it is most tangible: the immortal sign of how impossible the loss of instrumental value is, the function of ruins in the eternity of merchandise.

The abandonment of dolls is the death of childhood. When childhood dies, desires and passions - cornerstones of any marketing thought - also die.

In the flee-market, human beings regain possession of their childhood and its special objects: in such a way they themselves return to the "sacred place" of marketing - where passions, desires, and dreams unconditionally come true.

In the markets of dust, the features of the dolls/human beings are violated: the purity of their wrapping/urn - the security of the clinical perimeter of shop-windows - is negated. Their clothes - if still on them - are torn; their hair, no longer soft, reveals traces of past experiences, consumption, memory, pain arising from the need for a new value. Some dolls are only pieces, legs, bodiless heads - erased memories and oblivion: not of what once was, but of what remains.

Note

All photographs in this book were taken with the camera of a mobile phone, with no further elaboration. The photos were taken in flee-markets in Catania and Berlin between 2007 and 2008. A few photos in the appendix were taken in other locations. No scene depicted in this book was artificially staged.

All photographs in this book were taken with the camera of a mobile phone, with no further elaboration. The photos were taken in flee-markets in Catania and Berlin between 2007 and 2008. A few photos in the appendix were taken in other locations. No scene depicted in this book was artificially staged.

Books are printed on demand and personalized.