Elena Bellantoni and her search for a mark in space

First name and surname: Elena Bellantoni

Place and year of birth: Vibo Valentia (VV) 1975

Related galleries and social media contacts: @ele.bellantoni_studio

The body tells us everything that precedes the word and everything that the word, at times, fails to convey. It tells of hesitations, wounds and the postures we have learnt to defend ourselves, but also of desires, resistance and acts of defiance. For me, the body is an archive: it holds individual and collective memories, recording what history often does not know or does not wish to hear. In her practice, the body is never merely an image. It is a tool, a threshold, a battlefield, a political space. Through gesture, the act of walking, the voice, and exertion, the body expresses what cannot always be stated directly. Sometimes a repeated step or a mouth that remains closed can convey more than an entire speech. For me, the body is also a tool that writes space. It does not merely pass through it: it alters it, measures it, questions it. When I walk, when I perform, when I place a body in relation to a place, I am producing a form of writing. It is a physical, temporary form of writing, sometimes fragile, yet capable of leaving a trace. In this sense, the body is a pencil, a voice, a seismograph. It records the tensions of the landscape, of history, of power, of memory. For me, performance is precisely this: a mark in space. A mark that does not necessarily need to become a monument, but which can, for a specific moment in time, alter the perception of a place, of a community, of a body that is watching.

Her influences span visual art, cinema, performance, philosophy, feminism, poetry and psychoanalysis. She has never really separated these disciplines, conceiving her development as a continuous montage of images, words, bodies and thought.

There is an increasingly strong need to identify a lineage, a voice that precedes and accompanies one, especially among the female artists of the 1970s. Lucia Marcucci, Tomaso Binga, Mirella Bentivoglio, Ketty La Rocca, Ana Mendieta, Valie Export, Rebecca Horn and Pina Bausch are among those who have worked on language, writing, the body and the word as a ‘battlefield’, to quote Barbara Kruger. In them I find a radicalism that resonates with me: the ability never to separate the sign from the body, poetry from politics, irony from criticism, the word from the wound. On the other side of the coin, I look to artists such as Pino Pascali, Fabio Mauri, Gordon Matta-Clark and Francis Alys – certainly more ‘muscular’ in their approach, yet maintaining a very lucid and coherent line of thought, which always captivates me. Medardo Rosso’s sculptures are deeply loved, that material which always seems on the verge of appearing and disappearing. In Rosso, one is struck by the form that never quite closes; the sculpture as an impression, as a passage, as a phantom of vision. This proved highly influential in the creation of the large installation *Ruinate*, presented at MAXXI, for *Tragicomica*, curated by Francesco Stocchi and Andrea Bellini. In the same way, she has always been interested in painters who worked in series, because for her the series is already a threshold towards the concept of time, a sort of antechamber to video. When an image repeats itself, when it changes slightly, when it persists, it already enters a cinematic dimension. Cinema has been fundamental. She highlights silent film, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and their ability to let the body speak before words do. In Keaton, she sees a body that resists the world; in Chaplin, a body that transforms fragility into political intelligence. She also cites Dreyer, especially The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the face becomes a landscape, a trial, a martyrdom, a force field. For her, much of silent film is already at the origin of video art: the body, the gesture, the editing, the duration, the image that thinks without needing to explain. Among the directors who have shaped her perspective are Pasolini, Tarkovsky and Antonioni, and certainly the Nouvelle Vague. Pasolini for his ability to bring together the body, language, power and the sacred. Tarkovsky for his exploration of time, memory and matter. Antonioni for his long shots, for the void, for the waiting, for that tension between vision and the impossibility of truly seeing. The film she cites most often on the subject of vision is Blow-Up, because it speaks of the gaze, of detail, of the image that promises a truth and then takes it away. To these references she adds the French New Wave, in particular François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut is valued for his ability to weave together autobiography, childhood, desire, fragility and narrative. In his films there is often a kind of sentimental education of the gaze: the characters learn to live while trying to understand what it means to look, to love, to lose oneself. The intimate, almost diary-like dimension, in which cinema becomes a form of memory that is both personal and collective, is striking. The Nouvelle Vague demonstrates that cinema can also be conceived as an act of freedom, as a journey through the city—even in a Situationist sense—as a mobile, imperfect, vital form. The camera can become a body, editing can become thought, the street can become a studio. This conception of the moving image, capable of occupying the intersection of life, politics, poetry and language, has also greatly influenced my approach to video art and performance.

On a theoretical level, I often return to Hannah Arendt, Carla Lonzi, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Audre Lorde and Simone Weil. I am interested in language, voice, vulnerability, relationships, and identity as a construct and as a field of conflict. John L. Austin, with his idea that words are performative acts, has been fundamental to me. So too have Didi-Huberman, on the theme of survivals and images, and Bishop, on the relational dimension of the work. Poetry is another decisive influence: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Cristina Campo, Wisława Szymborska, Virginia Woolf, via Simone de Beauvoir, right through to Janis Joplin, Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, for the possibility of conceiving of writing as an exercise in freedom and consciousness. Poetry interests me because it does not explain, but leaves a mark. It possesses a precision that is not didactic, a form of oblique truth that often reaches places where theoretical language cannot. For me, poetry and performance are very similar; the statement is terse and precise.

Psychoanalytic language also features in my work: not in a clinical sense, but as a way of listening. I often work with associations, shifts in meaning, and recurring images. I am interested in the dream world as a revealing unconscious, as a place where what has been repressed returns to seek form. Words, in this sense, are litmus tests: they reveal affiliations, traumas and desires, but they can also give new meaning to the world.

The studio is a place of concentration, but also of necessary disorder. It is the place where things are not yet finished works, but are still seeking a form. There are materials, notes, images, books, failed attempts and half-formed ideas. For me, the studio is not just a physical space; it is a state of mind.

In Berlin, I had an independent space, 91mQ Art Project Space, in an old brewery in East Berlin, and that experience proved decisive. Berlin taught me that a studio can also be a platform – a place for meeting, for exchange, for possibilities. 91mQ was not just a place to work, but a space teeming with artists, conversations, attempts, mistakes and alliances. There I realised just how much artistic practice can flourish even outside institutional settings, within an independent, fragile yet very vibrant sphere. Then London opened up a whole new world. Studying and living there for two years profoundly shaped my artistic development; it gave me tools, freedom and a method. It allowed me to think of performance, video, language and the body not as separate realms, but as elements of a single creative exploration. Berlin gave me a sense of urgency and independence; London gave me a greater awareness of language and form. It’s a tough city, where you won’t survive unless you’re organised. He lived there thanks to an anti-squatting collective, Camelot, which provided him with a room and a workspace; however, he shared the house with thirteen other people in an old nursery, serving as a caretaker. The large house was in Brixton, and it was the early 2000s. His imagination wandered between London’s underground scenes and the squats.

The studio can be a room, a street, a classroom, a home, a square, a stretch of the Mediterranean coast, an archive, a train. It is the place where the world enters, is taken apart, questioned and pieced back together. The search for materials often begins in the studio, but it never remains confined there. India ink, for example, is a way of thinking for me: it is line, decision, gesture, an indelible mistake; I often carry it with me when I’m out and about.  Clay, on the other hand, is ‘home’ – a primordial element, a generative modelling material that takes shape in my mind and then in my studio. I am interested in situations where the material is not merely a medium, but thought made flesh. Sometimes I think of Xavier de Maistre’s “Viaggio intorno alla mia camera”, and that radical notion that a journey does not necessarily coincide with a distance travelled. One can move even whilst remaining still: through the gaze, the imagination, memory, transforming a familiar space into a constantly new territory. My idea of a studio is precisely this: a place that is not confined to four walls, but has a shifting threshold, capable of transforming what is near into elsewhere, and the gaze into a form of journey. My studio is my mind; it is me.

 

Empathy is fundamental to me, but it must be handled with care. It is not sentimental identification; it is not saying ‘I understand everything’. True empathy involves listening, responsibility and distance. It means engaging with a story without appropriating it, allowing oneself to be moved without encroaching on the other person’s space.

When working with personal accounts, biographies, painful memories or political narratives, one fundamental question arises: from what position am I speaking? What right do I have to use this voice, this image, this wound? Empathy thus becomes an ethical practice, not intended to elicit tears but to foster a fairer relationship with what is being observed and recounted.

In some of my work, the collective and participatory dimension has been central. I am referring to projects developed over several years, in which I have involved groups of women, students, performers, communities and local areas. This aspect, which has spanned at least five years of my creative output, has also found its way into my teaching. As a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, I am keen to take students beyond the purely individual dimension of their work, to help them understand that art can also be about relationships, responsibility, listening and the construction of contexts.

Empathy is not a generic feeling: it is a practice. It means learning to engage with images, stories and bodies without consuming them. It means accepting that the other remains the other, and that it is precisely within this distance that a deeper relationship can be built.

Comparisons with artists, curators, critics and scholars have also been important in this regard: encounters that have accompanied, interpreted and questioned my work from different perspectives. For an artist, it is important to be surrounded by perspectives capable not only of confirming, but also of challenging, of broadening one’s vocabulary, and of shifting one’s thinking.

 

I do not believe that art should have just one function. Art can unsettle, console, raise questions, build communities, create conflict and imagine futures. But I do believe that today one of its most urgent functions is to draw attention.

I belong to a generation born in the late 1970s, a generation that lived through the events in Genoa and the 2001 G8 summit. For those who experienced it as I did, that event became a collective trauma that shaped our relationship with the body, the community, the public square, the violence of power, and the very idea of democracy. It was not merely about politics in the strict sense: it was the realisation that bodies could be exposed, struck, controlled, yet were also capable of generating a sense of presence, dissent and collective imagination; Genoa marked a historic turning point for an entire generation.

For me, art today must be able to keep this wound in our gaze open. We live in an age of fleeting images, simplified languages and constant polarisation. Art can slow down our gaze, restore complexity, and allow us to dwell within a contradiction without resolving it immediately. It can create a space in which the body, memory, trauma, desire, politics and poetry come to coexist once more.

I believe that art can still be the space where polarities coexist without being resolved. Indeed, perhaps this is precisely its purpose: not to reconcile contradictions, but to keep them open.

A necessary art form need not be reassuring; it need not necessarily confirm what we already know or what the system expects. I have no interest in art that follows prevailing trends, that changes its nature simply to conform to the language of the moment. I believe strongly in consistency: not as rigidity, but as a deep commitment to a creative pursuit. One can change form, medium or scale, but one must be aware of the underlying urgency from which one starts.

Art can become ordinary when it adapts too well to already recognisable forms of expression, when it becomes a format, a system, a style. But the ordinary can also be the starting point from which to begin anew. A simple gesture, a word, a standing figure, a woman who says ‘no’ – these can open up a huge rift. For me, art remains necessary when it creates a shift, when it does not entirely coincide with what is expected of it. It does not necessarily have to be monumental or spectacular. Art is necessary when it shifts something: in the way we look, in the way we listen, in the way we take a stand. It does not have to provide definitive answers, but it must make certain questions impossible to ignore.

 

I believe the risk with captions arises when the work tries to explain too much, when it serves a message that is already fixed, when it merely ‘does its bit’ – taking a discourse and developing it, without transforming it or taking a stance. It becomes ‘trendy art’ that reassures the establishment, sticking to the major dominant themes. I see a growing institutionalisation of dissent
, which is often neutralised and turned into a shared language with a recognisable aesthetic. The risk is that radicalism becomes mere style.

The danger of being didactic exists only if we think of art as a form of authority, as an object that must ‘teach’ something to a passive audience. However, if this logic is inverted—if the artist is no longer regarded as a sacralised figure but rather as part of a collective process—the issue disappears; art does not have to ‘educate’ the public, it must spur them on to exist.

I am not interested in art that depicts the world without questioning it. Instead, I am interested in art that ceases to be complacent, that does not seek to please, that disrupts, that withdraws, that leaves room for the void from which something new can emerge. Art must not adapt to current events; it must dismantle them. I believe that political art should not illustrate a thesis, but create an experience. It must open up a space of ambiguity, of friction, of emotional and intellectual engagement.

To tackle political and social issues, one must focus on form, not just content. The way an image appears, the way a body occupies space, the rhythm of a video, the choice of a word, a material, a colour: all of this is already politics. Form is not decoration; it is thought. In the works I consider most successful, form and content coincide. There is not a political theme on one side and an aesthetic on the other: the very way the work exists is already its stance.

The encounter – to name but one – with Francis Alÿs in Beirut in 2009 was significant precisely in this regard. In his work, I have always recognised the ability to address political issues through minimal, poetic gestures – seemingly simple, yet extremely powerful. It is not a question of explaining the conflict, but of constructing an image-action that makes it perceptible, that allows it to enter the viewer’s body without turning it into a slogan.

I am also thinking of NOT HER, the project that emerged from an extensive archive of sexist advertising images and was subsequently developed in collaboration with Dior. Engaging with a major fashion house on an international scale was important, as it allowed me to gauge a body of work born out of critical research into the female body against a very broad visual framework. In that instance, the image no longer remained solely within the realm of art, but entered an enormous field of visibility, with all its complexities.

The same work later became a public artwork on the streets of Reggio Emilia, thanks to the Equal Opportunities Office of Reggio Emilia City Council. This development is particularly noteworthy: a work can change context, scale and audience, whilst continuing to challenge the viewer’s gaze. In public space, the artwork encounters not only those who have decided to go and see it, but also those who happen to pass by by chance. This creates a different kind of responsibility, but also a different kind of power.

 

My days are often very different from one another, as I juggle my artistic practice, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, design work, meetings, exhibitions and writing.

There are times when I spend many hours in the studio, and others when I’m more immersed in teaching or production. I love being on set – and therefore filming – I enjoy getting up at the crack of dawn, wandering through villages in search of locations for videos, carrying out location scouting and walking in search of inspiration. Her work involves research that operates on various levels, including the collective one. Once she has finished the writing phase of a video, she moves on to the sharing phase – not only with her collaborators, but also with the groups of people she gradually involves in running workshops or training sessions for her video-performance pieces. This aspect of openness and immersion marks the start of an adventure where the beginning is clear but the outcome remains open, providing vitality and creative tension that is central to her practice. On a practical level, however, she begins each day by gathering her thoughts: notes in scattered notebooks, Post-it notes, images and texts. For her, writing is part of the artistic process: she compiles long lists of words, phrases, titles, ‘poetic’ compositions or simply plays at associating words. The titles of my works often serve as my guiding light: I pursue a word as if I were a truffle-hunting dog and lose myself in its twists and turns. In the company of the ‘breadline’ – the bread line or subsistence line – I spent a year travelling around Europe.

Then there are the meetings, the calls, my relationship with the editors, the students, the studio visits and fundraising for my productions. Sometimes I refer to myself as a ‘fund-hunter’ because I am always on the lookout for calls for proposals or grants to support my work. This aspect is becoming increasingly important today because my installations and videos require ever-higher production costs.

I do not adhere to the romantic artist’s routine of secluding myself in my studio, although I do consider it my ‘safe haven’ where time stands still. My day consists of many overlapping plans, but I always try to leave room for vision, because without that, work risks becoming nothing more than administration. Whenever I can, I escape to Ostia, especially in winter, walking through its dunes to gaze at the sea, which somehow acts as a mirror for me, putting my thoughts in order.

For me, it is essential to move between the inside and the outside. Travel is not merely a biographical circumstance, but a method: moving means exposing oneself to places, people, languages, rhythms and the unexpected. But it also means triggering an internal shift: shifting one’s thoughts, changing one’s perspective, and challenging one’s own habits.

She is currently working on several projects that, in different ways, continue to explore the relationship between the body, the word, memory, the political sphere and the Mediterranean. Ruinate, presented at MAXXI last April as part of Tragicomica, remains a vivid work for her: an army of rebellious women, terracotta figures, cloaks, words and voices that narrate stories of women’s resistance to patriarchal and criminal violence. She is also preparing the public presentation of the previously unseen video of Ruinate and the book documenting the entire project, produced thanks to the support of the Academy of Fine Arts in Catanzaro with PNRR funding. The video, filmed this winter, represents a fundamental part of the project, as it captures the relationship between bodies, landscapes, ruins, mafia trials, voices and territories. The artist collaborated with six professional actresses and six student performers from the Catanzaro Academy of Fine Arts; she describes the work as transitional, having written both the full script and the performance score before also assuming direction.

She is currently pursuing a research project that began at the Manifattura Tabacchi in Chiaravalle, thanks to the Department of Culture, where she was struck by the blue glass used to protect the tobacco and the memory of women’s labour. From there, she is developing a project that weaves together installation, video, archives and workers’ memory. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition curated by Cecilia Canziani at Sara Zanin’s Galleria Z2O. The artist is also planning a solo exhibition at Palazzo Poli – the Central Institute for Graphic Arts – which represents an important opportunity, following the presentation of her work at the Merz Prize, to showcase the entire research process behind "On the breadline". For 2027, she is preparing a major solo exhibition in Bratislava, curated by Lydia Pribisova, based precisely on the works linked to the Mediterranean which, perhaps partly due to her southern roots, continues to be a waterway she wishes to explore. Her next research project, in fact, will pave the way towards Egypt and North Africa.

There was no single epiphany; rather, it was a gradual process of realisation. At twenty, one is still an artist in the making, with an aspiration that must be tested and transformed into reality. It took her thirty years to prove to herself and others that the ‘fantasy’ she had nurtured during her teenage years was not merely a hunch but a desire capable of standing on its own. As a young girl, she did nothing but read the biographies and writings of artists in those black-covered editions from Abscondita. Desire quickly turns into ‘seduction’; when one encounters Art, it enchants and never lets go. As a teenager, she would escape to foreign art academies during the summer to take courses in painting and drawing. She would lie to her family, claiming she was attending a language course abroad, in order to safeguard the boundaries of her own world. She recalls that restlessness with remarkable clarity, because it coincided with the day she entered adulthood as a woman.

Berlin and London were two decisive stages on this journey; after graduating in Contemporary Art from La Sapienza University in Rome, I fled to Berlin. I was seeking silence, the cold and “a room of my own” in the capital, which bore the scars of a city divided in two, and that is where I found myself. I breathed in a raw, independent freedom; an art scene made up of self-managed spaces, encounters and possibilities not yet institutionalised – it was the early 2000s. London, on the other hand, gave me the chance to structure that freedom, to channel it into a method, and to explore the relationship between drawing, sculpture, performance, video, language and theory in greater depth.

Encounters with other artists have been crucial, as has recognition from one’s peers. Not so much as role models to emulate, but as an opportunity to realise that a creative practice can take many forms.

Artist residencies have played a central role in my development because they force you to move away, to engage with a place, within a limited timeframe, with people you don’t know, with a community, and with a local area.

Winning the Italian Council award, fourth edition, with "On the Breadline" was a significant moment. The project took her on a journey lasting about a year through Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Italy, taking in Palermo, Athens, Belgrade and Istanbul. It was a physical and political journey, but also a journey into the nature of crisis, of borders, of bread, of the collective voice, and of the feminine. On the Breadline allowed her to work with choirs of a hundred women, performative actions, abandoned buildings, and places marked by history and the economy. It was one of the projects in which she realised most strongly that the body can inscribe itself upon space and that the collective voice can take on a form of its own.

The border has been a place I have inhabited through my artistic and teaching practice; it is a porous border that I have sought to construct, one in which identity is contained yet continually redefines itself without becoming rigid. Over the years, I have learnt to be of mixed heritage, to allow myself to be influenced and to ‘become a sponge’.

I began by asking questions: about power, identity, the feminine, language, translation, and boundaries, precisely. Even today, it seems to me that being an artist means just this: never ceasing to ask questions, even when they are uncomfortable, and finding, each time, a form capable of bringing them into being in the world. Her approach to video art and experimental cinema stems precisely from these questions: not to narrate linearly, but to construct a score of gestures, images, words and rhythms. For her, video is a space where the body can become montage and the word can become image.

This use of multiple forms of expression—performance, video, sculpture, installation, writing, sound, collective action—forms part of a multi-layered research project. It can be seen in "Ruinate", "Se ci fosse luce sarebbe bellissimo" and "Pensate domani è la fine del mondo": different works, yet united by the need to allow places, bodies, stories and languages to settle within me. I am interested in returning to places, not using them merely as backdrops. Places need time. They settle within me, change me, and continue to speak even after the work is finished.

In many of my projects, the Mediterranean is the subject of inquiry, a field of research, a wound and a possibility. I am thinking of works such as "Corpo Morto", "Ho annegato il Mare", "Maremoto" and "Cemento": the sea is never merely a landscape; it is a boundary, a political entity, a place of crossing, of loss, of desire and of memory. It is a space that unites and divides, that welcomes and repels. I keep returning to it because I feel that many of the contradictions of our time are concentrated there.

In "Ho annegato il Mare", produced for Manifesta 12, there was a significant turning point in my research. The interview with Fiammetta Borsellino became the narrative voice of the video – a voice that traverses memory, justice and the nation’s collective wound. In Corpo Morto, by contrast, words literally become a lifebuoy to which I cling. It is not a metaphor; it is a body trying not to sink, a phrase that keeps one afloat, a language that becomes survival: “ancora corpo morto tra cielo e terra coraggio”.

“I have created twelve figures based on my own body measurements, but they are not self-portraits: they are a chorus of twelve talking cloaks.  Where language becomes the only weapon. I am interested in that point where ruin ceases to be an end and becomes a form of resistance. These women, whose stories I have gathered during ‘ndragheta trials, have stood up to their families of origin; their bodies have become sensitive armour against the violence of patriarchy."

“I’m interested in words that already contain an image and a wound: ‘Corpo morto’ (dead body), in seafaring parlance, is a concrete mooring point on the seabed. I threw six ‘corpi morti’ into the sea, to which I attached 35 linear metres of letters made of polyurethane foam: language becomes a lifebuoy – the only way to stay afloat.”

“I’ve moved a lifeguard tower into the city; the sea cannot drown itself – it’s a paradox. On our coasts, paradoxes take shape in the form of tonnes of concrete that have obliterated Palermo’s sea and its ‘sacco’ since the 1970s. The sea has turned black and black-and-white, just like the Palermo depicted by Letizia Battaglia or Ciprì and Maresco. If the sea drowns… nothing remains.”

“I wondered whether, within the factory’s production system, if we change our habitus, anything changes or shifts. I created 14 sculptural garments which the workers at Dino Zoli Textile wore during their shift. I sought the ‘light’ – taking my cue from the last letter Aldo Moro wrote to his wife Eleonora in 1978 – within the everyday gestures of work. When these gestures are shared, performed and transformed together, the productive body can once again become a relational body.”

“I delved into the images that, for decades, have constructed the female body as an object to sell products. A certain type of sexist advertising. I have sought to liberate the female body from seventy years of semantic confinement. I worked on an archive of over four hundred images, engaging with them performatively and also addressing the sexist slogans. I was interested in using the very language of advertising to bring it crashing down from within. This gave rise to NOT HER, my campaign in which I declare: ‘SHE IS NO LONGER THIS’.”

“I followed the bread trail through Palermo, Athens, Belgrade and Istanbul. Bread is a fundamental measure of life, but also a political dividing line: it separates survival from rights, hunger from revolt. I have worked with a hundred women who sing ‘Bread & Roses’ and perform the mechanics of capital in abandoned places once intended for work. The ‘brealine’ is the line that connects these four Mediterranean cities.”

"The phrase comes across as a warning, but it is not merely about an end. I am interested in that point where language ceases to describe the present and becomes an entity that compels us to look at it. I shot the video in Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, where I entrust this warning to 29 ravens; it becomes a compelling reflection on the present. The final shot of the video is the same as the one that concludes Nostalghia, a 1983 film by Andrei Tarkovsky.”

“I ride my bicycle into the sea, knowing it is an impossible feat. From the other shore emerges Ibrahima, a young Senegalese man, with his strength and disarming beauty. The tidal wave is this uncontrollable movement, the impossible act of crossing the Mediterranean on a bicycle. It is a test of strength: the body gauges its own limits just as it attempts to overcome them.”

“I have transformed light, childlike objects associated with the sea into heavy, immobile forms made of concrete. A material that has destroyed and obliterated our coastlines since the 1960s. The word ‘CeMento’ encompasses the material used in construction, but also the verb ‘to lie’: a promise of prosperity that has left the landscape scarred. These are all deceptive objects; they look as though they are made of rubber and ought to float, but instead they sink.”

“I used my body to explore a language of gestures that belongs to the history of power and propaganda. Repeating those gestures does not mean copying them: it means examining to what extent they can still reappear in bodies and in the present. The gestures in question feature in the thirteen photographs taken by Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer, whilst Hitler listened to his own speeches on a gramophone and performed them. I wondered whether it is possible to re-enact these gestures – and whether it is also possible for history to repeat itself?”