La Velina

La velina is a visual and allegorical critique of Berlusconi-era television, the systematic exhibition of the female body, and the commodification of nudity. The work stages an operation of reduction and control of the gaze: a naked woman confined within a fish-shaped form that resembles an aquarium, a screen, a television bubble. The crucial detail is the erased face. The woman is shown — her naked body is exposed, made available to the gaze — yet her face, the seat of personal identity and the capacity to look outward, is entirely absent, covered, rendered invisible. This is not a simple disguise or animal mimicry: it is the evidence of symbolic violence. The figure is present as a body to be consumed, absent as a person to be recognized. The fish's eye, red and confrontational, looks outward and seems to replace the woman's erased gaze. It is the eye of television, of reception, of the screen that dominates. The blue depth of the surrounding space intensifies the effect of isolation and confinement: the woman swims in a space where there is no relation, only one-directional exposure. La velina thus dismantles the television mechanism that transforms the female body into ornamental surface, visible only insofar as it remains silent, immobile, available. It is a work that accuses not only the television industry but the very gaze that accepts and reproduces this reduction of woman to a faceless, voiceless body-object.