La Recherche

The project consists of a physical and poetic journey which takes places in different countries. From a practical point of view, I look for myself by asking strangers on the street: “Excuse me, are you Luisa Turuani?”; the public spaces is the stage and random people are the unconscious co-author of the performance. The action is taking place in various venues: Milan, Genoa, Paris, Venice; it will involve also New York, Amsterdam, Palermo and others. The action can therefore be defined as a “life-time-performance”, a gesture that is repeated without ever finding a definitive answer. The insistent “no” shapes an impalpable identity and the passers-by are co-authors of an heroic and unsuccessful action. Apparently subjective, the search for identity has a collective horizon; the project infact reflects on digital platforms of communication: social media allows to reach people all over the world, and so it seems obvious to believe that we actually know people on the net. Yet this knowledge is extremely superficial and human contacts are becoming increasingly difficult. The performance is not an absurd way to refuse the use of social media, but it is an opportunity to reflect on the border between reality and fiction, between what we actually know and what we think we know.
Current society is exhausted by pursuing myths, heroes, models that show us who we should be; it is therefore easy to delegate our identity to politicians, influencers or anyone we deem reliable. By doing so, we believe we are perfectly suited to the world around us. Yet something is missing… The project looks sympathetically at this lack, un enigmatic identity, an emptiness that must remain so.