Eleonora Calvelli

Eleonora Calvelli's book 'Making Love to G is gonna be like the First Time I Tried a Cheeseburger' is an exciting example of an artist's book in the post-photographic era.

The book is a peephole into the bizarre world and aesthetics of reality programs we are nowadays surrounded with.

Calvelli precisely investigated and edited this and made an intense volume out of it. You could call it a Diary of Disgust.

We are witness to obscene and fascinating typologies of the events that take place in holiday houses that function as television studios to exploit the intimate.

Nothing is not seen.

Bedrooms with duvet sculptures in black and white surveillance footage, where the obvious sexual events have taken place.

The color section in the book's center functions like an explosion. A gruesome series of girls' fighting scenes are on display. The fact that the images are blurred makes them even more impactful.

The book is so impactful because Calvelli focuses on the sculptural elements seen in this subculture.

I know for sure that: 'Looking at Calvelli's book is gonna be like the first time you tried something unexpected.'

“Making love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger”, by Eleonora Calvelli

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”

Guy Debord, The Society Of The Spectacle, 1967

"Making Love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger" is a long-term project, commenced in 2012, which aims to reflect on how reality shows, which play on themes such as intimacy, voyeurism, and violence, offer a privileged observation point for learning about the development of the cultural industry and how the market colonizes mass communication.

The project consists of two series of photographs: the first part includes black-and-white photos taken of the television screen, capturing several frames from the DVDs of the British series Geordie Shore. The work focuses only on the moments in which the actors of the cast have lovemaking with the other house occupants. The idea behind the story, inspired by other longstanding TV formats such as Big

Brother is to bring boys and girls together in a house and film their interactions 24/7. The plot of each episode consists of an almost unbroken series of sometimes violent arguments, drunkenness, relationships, sex, jealous scenes, and making-ups between the occupants of the house.

The second part of the project features color photographs of girls wrestling and hitting each other, taken of YouTube videos viewed on a computer monitor, capturing scenes from the reality American TV show "Bad Girls Club," which depicts the quarrels and physical comparisons of the actresses of the cast. On YouTube, there are many collections of "girls' fights" videos with situations that refer to both real-life and reality TV shows. I decided to center my research on the video series taken from the Bad Girls Club TV series because they have a well-defined kitsch aesthetic and reveal the construction of the television format in a more evident way.

In this second series of photographs, I used the lack of focus to "hack" the TV message and make it more ambiguous. The resulting images oscillating from Eros to Thanatos confuse our vision and raise a fundamental question. Do these women love or hate each other?

In the chapter of "The Skin of Culture" called "Television, The Collective Imagination", Derrick de Kerckhove postulates that television speaks to our body, understood as the neuromuscular system, rather than to our mind, leaving us little time to reflect on what we're watching. The images on television flash across the screen so quickly that the viewer's mind does not have time to process them, forcing him to "reconstruct."

While our mind is distracted, distancing itself from the information on the screen, our neuromuscular system follows the moving images, physically responding to the stimuli offered by television.

“ This is involuntary because of our antediluvian biological programming: the autonomic nervous systems of higher mammals are trained to respond to any perceptible change in the environment that might be relevant to survival. We are conditioned to respond involuntarily to any kind of stimulation, internal or external, with what in clinical psychophysiology is called the Orienting Response (OR).

[...] In life, we accommodate stimuli as we get to know them: either we recognize them immediately or we quickly develop a strategy to deal with them. A completed response to a stimulus is called a closure. So in life, most stimuli awake an OR, call for a closure and receive it. With television, though, we are never done with the initial stimulus: TV provokes rapid successions of OR’s without allowing time for closure.”

Television eliminates the "distancing" effect. The time interval between stimulus and response does not allow us to process the information consciously nor to reflect critically on what we're watching, thus exposing ourselves to all kinds of subliminal messages conveyed by the medium.

However, "Making Love to G." is not just a project that intends to reflect on television and the reality show genre but also our relationship with the media. How do we watch, and how much attention do we pay to what we see?