Are you nobody, Too?

Are you nobody, too? originates from a found photograph — a blurred, elusive portrait in imperfect grain. It is the only existing image of Irma, the artist’s great-aunt, who throughout her life was kept away — due to her mental condition — from public view as well as from any official family genealogy. Starting from this denied identity, Are you nobody, too? sheds light on the taboos that have long surrounded mental distress, particularly in relation to women, who throughout history have often been the target of practices of domestication and subjugation against which the mind has rebelled. Through one of the first deepfake apps, Irma finally finds her voice. The stills taken from the video, presented as a conceptual flipbook — whose frames reveal, through Irma’s lips, a phrase by Zelda Fitzgerald — in their fixedness, consecrate the act by fulfilling their primary function as testimony, revealing artistic practice as a political and radical act of constructing and redefining the real. The hypertext is composed of verses and fragments from poems and novels by female writers and poets affected by psychic disorders — words that unravel from their original narratives to reweave themselves into a new fabric, processed by an
algorithm that randomly reshuffles the sentences. Irma’s body thus becomes a site of redemption, an anti-body that hosts a multitude, defying all forms of normativity, regulation, management, and control.