Laila was the first character we had before we moved into ‘The Identity Machinery’. The idea was to make a work about the exotification of Roma people: in all fairytales and in romantic pop culture ‘Gypsies’ are great, traveling and spiritual people. Yet everywhere Roma are extremely discriminated and treated with prejudice. Things are never simple and as we got inspired by the infamous ‘Foxglove‘ story, we painted this ‘nightly fire’ as ‘gypsies’ are usually pictured as people who dance and party around the fire in the night. She dances on credit cards of her lovers but we thought it would be great if it looked clearly fake, a bit like a ’30s movie poster.

 

We have not worked on her character after we started going wild with the other characters. But here time will come!

 

Laura A Dima and I have a project we call ‘The Identity Machinery’ – this is an ongoing artwork about a person suffering from a ‘Multiple reality Disorder’. Laura plays all the characters for which we create fictional worlds and we take care of the styling and assigned art together.

Laila Esmaralda is a character from ‘The Identity Machinery’ – a project that at this moment is mostly a soap on Instagram. It is a collaboration with my partner Laura A Dima, who plays the characters. I do the photography and together we doe the styling, making up the stories and everything.

The Identity Machinery started because of out interest in fetishism and psychology, or perhaps mostly in group behaviour. We noticed that fetishes and women’s attire often are derivates from a functional starting position. Nun’s or Nurse’s clothes indicated a function and a way of life – but type those terms in a search engine and you will see something else compared to how it used to look. Also, the derivates are quite different than the originals: if you look at it with an artistic eye, the ‘French Maid’ costume you’ll see now when you search is a sublime abstraction of the original: you’ll get only what you need to recognise it as such and it shows how conceptual the human mind is. Besides that the costumes are of course very sexualised and minimised and to us it seemed we missed a bit of a chance here. 

We have a preference of the very beginning of the sexualisation of uniforms and the like. In ’40’s, ’50’s and ’60’s films for instance, you will see pretty people in pretty uniforms, not objectified yet, usually having a real character but somehow very attractive.  We take this confusing and somewhat voyeuristic look at attire as a starting position to do statements about the objectification of the self on Instagram: there are lots of ‘influencers’ out there who are only skin deep – and yet they are nowadays pop stars. We wonder how out society could come so far that holding up a product on camera is a seen as an envious dream job. 

We see a lot of stupidity on social media: the ultimate democracy of free opinions led us to a world where we are empty shells who compete in beauty and wealth, and can say anything without feeling consequences. Yet we share in tribes of the likeminded and think we are ‘right’ by having ‘followers’, and throll others.

We try to make the ultimate Instagram cliché’s, sublime objectifications of ‘types’ of women, and then give them a story of their own. As a result we reverse the mass-social tendency to objectify women.

But, in our work, humor always plays a role. We love to vent out the stupidity or naivité of certain characters. We enjoy the stupid reactions, mostly of men ready to give up everything for an image and people who think they can talk on behalf of ‘all women’ when they publicly try to point out flaws in our morals.