Life goes on and I stand still watching it.
I look back over my years and feel an emptiness that remains, with difficulty I drag this heavy body into the space I am allowed.
Outside everything is in motion, imperfection dances, but here it is an obsession.
What is true about what I’m experiencing?
I can no longer hear/feel, I waver between dream and reality and I am in the middle, suspended without considering time any longer.
But there someone is waiting for me.

I thought the idea for this project was just an intuition. One day I thought, “I see a woman in an empty house, she is alone, yet gracefully dressed.

While visualising the photos I would take, I thought these images represented the feeling of isolation that many of us experienced during the lockdown, which I personally had already reworked into a series of photos taken precisely during those months.

And yet the image of this lonely woman, imprisoned in a gilded cage without bars or padlocks, was asking me to be transformed into something real, understandable.

I wanted the model to have an empty look, absent first and foremost to herself, but as in my mind I was transforming this image into something more and more vivid, simultaneously increased the feeling of déjà-vu and inadequacy of what I wanted to represent. Then I realised that She would be fake, literally even before symbolically.

I started looking for mannequins, dolls and finally life-size sex dolls realistic enough to cast doubt on their essence, in order to create a feeling of disturbance that in robotics is called ‘Uncanny Valley’: that phenomenon of familiarity and empathy that we instinctively create with anthropomorphic things, but that degenerates into the unpleasant feeling that something is ‘wrong’ when that verisimilitude comes to deceive us.

I found the doll, the clothes and the house, I took the pictures. And only at that point did I realise what I was really doing: I was reworking my anorexia for the first time.