NOT HER

Much research has served as the basis for this exclusive project, for which Elena Bellantoni decided to place herself in the shoes of a ”sexist advertiser”, putting together 24 new ads retracing the aesthetics and representations of the 1940s to the present day. The new campaigns, specifically thought up for her work, are made up of photographs coupled with slogans, each of which ”has its own phrase”, as if it were a linguistic response to the images produced. The protagonists of these advertisements are embodied by the artist herself, who has elaborated a set for each shot, immersing herself in the situations and bodies of other women, the subject of the advertising discourse.

From a visual point of view, the artist chose to use split-flap grids, an analog device adapted to digital language in which images are composed and repeated punctually by the rhythm of the mechanism. The split-flaps emit noise, cadencing the succession of characters, underlining in a slightly intrusive way the state of things: the female body and its exploitation as an object of desire and of the male gaze. This deliberately pop visual universe is populated by small objects that move like animated motifs on a collage. They become ironic, grotesque elements that float in space and become part of the heart of the scenes. It’s a two-dimensional world, the details of which are generated by artificial intelligence: a fictional universe, constructed and studied to perfection, just like advertising. YOU MAY THINK THIS IS NOT TRUE, IT’S JUST REAL.

The installation has been created to be highly immersive, utilizing the sequence of images and text in the video animation to convey the media hammering to which we are constantly subjected, and which has forged a certain hackneyed and sexist imaginary, from the 1940s onwards. The two main colors of the installation, yellow and fuchsia, like two highlighters, are intended to emphasize this juxtaposition of bodies and language. NOT HER is the response, the message that accompanies all the images: to every sexist slogan, the visual model’s urgent, repetitive response is always NOT HER. NOT HER is an image in itself, the response to the stereotype, because it’s not HER.

THE MAKING-OF

^Making-of