Cristina Rizzi Guelfi —we need a face [?]

The obsession with selfies is a practice that has spread globally in recent years, so much so that it is the subject of discussion among psychologists and psychiatrists to understand if it was appropriate to identify it as a real obsessive-compulsive disease. The responsibility for this compulsion should not be attributed to the smartphone or the selfies themselves but to social networks.

Through selfies, in fact, you have the opportunity to show yourself to the world exactly the way you want to be seen, or to make you perceive the sensations of a given moment only from the expression of the face, selecting precisely the information to be communicated. Selfies have become a simple and immediate storytelling tool. In an increasingly frenetic and immersive communication space, it is no coincidence that selfies have an increasingly important relevance. It is a kind of return to origins, made up of a representative language that is easy to use. The series "we need a face [?]" was created to ironize the widespread practice of obsession with selfies, replacing faces with photographs acquired from a bank of images from the 1950s and 1960s. The question mark between the brackets is intended, because it asks two questions: 1) Is it necessary to photograph your face? On the one hand, no, because body dysmorphism is a psychological disorder, typical of our society based on appearance and self-image, which causes in some individuals a continuous dissatisfaction and creates in the individual a conviction of having imaginary defects, related to your physical appearance, so much so that it becomes an obsession. 2) But without photographing the face, how can you understand the facial expression or the emotion you want to express? As Arthur Schopenhauer said: "A person's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this person's thoughts and aspirations "

For more information, please contact Cristina Rizzi Guelfi at: cristinarizziguelfi@gmail.com
Interview with Cristina Rizzi Guelfi here