This content contains scenes that may shock an uninformed audience.
Do you still want to watch it?
Ciao Bella
“Working on Italian Renaissance painting for the creation of D’après J.C., I realised how the artists of that period drew inspiration from the art and writings of antiquity to establish the canons of feminine beauty. The drawn image of an unreal, unnatural body became, depending on the theme, the carnal envelope of the Virgin, Mary Magdalene or Venus, and then served as a model for all Western art.
Paradoxically, what remains unchanged between the virgins of the Quattrocento and the silhouettes of 21st century mannequins is the idealisation of feminine beauty. It remains a fantasised projection of male desire, whose images ensnare even those who reject them. Women are supposed to define themselves in terms of an aesthetic that is assigned to them and that they impose on themselves.
I wanted to address our ambiguous relationship to these images and question the representation of women through different periods and different media.
In Ciao bella, the five dancers physically embody these stereotypes to the extreme, subverting them from within. They manipulate the clichés with humour and construct a perfectly artificial creature, fabricated to the point of monstrosity, but also capable, in the end, of escaping all references, and perhaps finding her freedom in this paroxysm of appearance.”
Source : Herman Diephuis
