XY XX

In 1942, Alfred Hitchcok’s Rear Window glorified our fascination with peeping through the neighbours’ windows. Over half a century later, our beloved junk TV has accustomed us to the basic idea behind the reality show: to make a spectacle of ALL the details of our lives and those of others, pushing us to take part in a visual orgy in which absolutely EVERYTHING is on show.

Sheltered by the darkness, Fosi Vegue observes the events unfolding through the windows of a common courtyard: rooms used by prostitutes and their clients, summer nights, blinds up to let in the breeze… XY XX (2014) is a starling update of Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows, highlighting the exent to which post-photography blends snooping, spying and surveillance. In a challenge to desacralised ethics and prudish legislation, the picture is stolen, privacy is invaded. Throwing off the bonds that govern the legitimacy of the visible, in a kind of exacerbated voyeurism, Vegue embarks on a stark exploration of “sex as the catalyst of our instincts, our desires and our contradictions… Sex as a control system”. Passion and pleasure trigger a fusion of flesh, heat and emotions, that in XY XX is also linked to a certain code, the code of digital photography, ever-present in the attendant “noise”: pixellation and blurring hint at the inaccuracy of the webcam and the innocence of the amateur, factors which when taken as rhetorical are read as the naked truth, in real time.

(text by Joan Fontcuberta)