Residue, film and stills by Sarnia de la Maré .......
The moment you share your body online, it no longer belongs to you.
This is what emerged through reworking the film footage from 2021, through drawing, layering, slowing, extracting stills, was the sensation of being grabbed. Not metaphorically, but physically. Hands everywhere. Hands that leer, grope, frame, distort, and claim. The kind of hands that belong to monster media figures: exaggerated, anonymous, insatiable.
This isn’t about individual viewers per se.
It’s about systems.
The algorithm does not look, it grasps.
The feed does not observe, it consumes.
Visibility is not neutral; it is tactile, invasive, and often predatory.
More to the point, the beast (media, AI, algorithms, consumerism) want to touch women, to leer, to fondle, to feed and ultimately to love or to hate.
The embodoed identity becomes a site of pressure. What interests me most is that the digital violence towards women is subtle, pretending to be playful.
The still images extracted from the film feel familiar to me. These hallucinations leave residue on my soul. In a world that values beauty above all else, a new art is relevant. The truth is not pretty.
This series isn’t about shame or spectacle.
It’s about physical reaction in a digital world.
The tightening of the chest.
The urge to pull back.
The sense that your body through its image has been touched without consent.
Great art often sits unresolved, it is a warning to look in at ourselves and to judge accordingly.
#sarniadelamare