about

My artistic practice has always been focused on the relationship between religion and power, using video-installations and sculptures. I’m interested in the manifestation of the secular power of religion and in the blurred boundaries between the public performances enacted by political and religious leaders in the media.

Contemporary media images, spread by political or religious leaders, are conceived to gain popularity and to increase power. How does the media confer power to a leader? And what is the role of the audience in giving power to him?

I’m interested in the strategies with which institutions, as politics and religion, use the public contemporary media to influence public opinion, that in return legitimate the leader’s power through consensus: the support given to a leader by the applause of a yelling crowd, legitimize the power of the performing person. According to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, power is given to leaders by acclamation (cheering and applauding masses). He states that public opinion is the modern form of acclamation which is a powerful tool that survive in modern society from early christianity and roman empire.

Through the footage of the last meeting of Barak Obama and Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2014 and the Pope’s speech given to the European parliament on the 25th of november 2014, I investigated the blurred boundaries between the sacred and secularized strategies used in the media. The religious institution shares the same media technique with many other areas of modern secular society, from politics, to entertainment to information. What are the different tasks of the religious and secularized institutions? Are they that different, or do they overlap and almost meld in to one another?

Selecting public footage of the meeting and accompanied them with the voice of a narrator, my video essay A Glorious society reveal the manipulative and staged nature of the public images, so that the viewer’s perception can be disturbed and be challenged. In my work I also question the value of leader’s speeches in relation to their voice and image. What gives power to the leader’s speech, his voice, the content of the speech or his image?