In 1974, designer Rudi Gernreich confessed to The San Francisco Examiner, “Nostalgia worries me. It’s a drug.” Inspired by Gernreich, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday just a few days ago, multi-disciplinary artist Marco Siciliano interprets The Thong through a series of self-portraits.
In this series Siciliano’s body becomes a medium for the costume to appear and disappear in the darkness that envelops an architecture oozing with nostalgia. The lines of the costume act graphically on the body, creating a puzzle of muscles and shapes no longer tied to a binary conception of the body.
Marco Siciliano, born in Caltagirone (IT) in 1991. He previously graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 2017 with a degree in interior design, currently studies sculpture under Monica Bonvicini at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. His artistic research is shaped by the study of architecture and expressed through the use of photography, video, collage, sculpture and installations. Body and space play a game that takes place between public and private: where modesty conceals its appearance or slowly reveals it. Together they show the vulnerability of proxemics; the inability to reach the optimal distance between two bodies in order to interact and not hurt each other.