Dopo il Corpo

Polaroid Decay serie 2025

After the Body is a project that investigates the body as an unstable surface, a shell subject to transformation, wear, and loss. The work stems from a reflection on the photographic image understood as a material trace rather than a representation, and on the progressive loss of the body’s physical consistency within contemporary experience.

The use of Polaroids and the experimentation with emulsion manipulation introduce a process of transformation that acts directly on the photographic surface. Through detachment, deterioration, and alteration of the image, what was once fixed loses definition and stability, opening the image to a condition of continuous change.

This process of material corrosion finds a direct parallel in the condition of the body in contemporaneity. The human body, once a measure of identity and presence, now occupies an ambiguous zone, suspended between physical decomposition and its constant digital reproduction, between matter and simulation. The emulsion that deteriorates in the Polaroid through a slow and irreversible process recalls flesh that ages, wears, and transforms, while society promotes an ideal of an eternal image, infinitely modifiable yet devoid of weight and substance.

As suggested by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, reality is progressively replaced by representations that no longer refer to an original: the body becomes a simulacrum, emptied of its materiality and reconstructed within a system of signs. In this scenario, the body is no longer solely biological, but takes shape as an exposed surface, an unstable territory traversed by technology, aesthetics, and obsolescence.