i've seen someone that wasn't there

I’ve seen someone that wasn’t there

Entering the exhibition space, you will become its own central subject, you will take part in its visual commentaries. Usually, in the centre of the exhibition space stands the Artist, with all his visual imagery. The viewer is usually invited to enter the intimacy of the artists’ spaces – visual, mental, imaginative – to parse, to visit, to appreciate them and to find a place in their proximity, in a world more or less similar. Still, we are speaking of his visual spaces, the other one’s spaces!

In this world, the audience is a spectator or a tourist, but not a real subject. Often the artist’s virtuosity enlarges the distance towards the viewer. The visitor’s own universes, his own inner spaces are refused, abandoned, forgotten, in favor of those artistically manipulated by the exhibitor.

I’ve seen someone that wasn’t there is a project whose main goal is to bridge the gap between the exhibitor and the visitor.   

The work’s intention is that of getting all eyes on the public as individual/individuality. The projected eyes follow you as you come in, thanks to some presence sensors and to an interactive software program. You enter an exhibition, to look, to evaluate, to choose and you are watched by hundreds of eyes, turning you into the subject itself, getting involved in the machinery of visual/visuality as a main reference point.

When hundreds of eyes are watching me, all I can do in turn is to watch myself and try to detect who is this observer; thus I become the main subject in this visual paradigm. Thanks to its meaning, I’ve seen someone that wasn’t there refers to The Absence of Presence; to the exhibitor who gives up his role as protagonist of the whole visual commentary in favor of the visitor, and, at the same time it refers to the visitor before he discovers himself under his own analysis. 

The work belongs to a series in which the exhibiting strategies are centred on the viewer, on the public. (2META)