“Exposure”, DVD, dur.20', 2003

Exposure is a reference both to exposure to prying eyes in a public space and to the amount of time film is exposed to light for realty to be burnt onto it.

Shots of people sitting in cars as they wait at traffic lights play on four monitors placed in a line.

Exposure is a site of transfer, temporary pause and continuous movement, where the subject shares space with lots of others who are automatically shunted forwards by the next one.

What takes place really concerns the communication of an exposed surface as if the invisible boundaries that surround our bodies were there to establish just the right distance necessary to afford a better look at the world.

I am interested in working with the idea of privacy as a process through which people allow themselves to become either more or less accessible: its a real struggle to define the legislative boundaries.

Each work is made up of a large number of pieces, single spaces and people with their own particular emotional presence.

The faces are not simple portraits: caught off-guard, they question the image as they shift their glance towards the camera filming them. This interrogation challenges the viewer, who in turn becomes involved in this looking game. In this way a dialectic relationship is set up, which oscillates imperceptibly between the person acting out the scene and the viewer.

Behind the transparent division of the car window ‹ an ambiguous boundary delimiting public and private dimensions ‹ the car’s interior opens up to the outside, and the subjects react within its confined limits, somewhere between intimacy and exposure, isolation and revelation.

Like a display window, a frontier or a television screen open to the world.

Chiara Pirito