We often believe we’ve seen someone yet we embrace him in preconceived, abstract visions, idealized and blind glances. How many shadows lie between you and me? Your eyes don’t do me justice, betrayed by your looks; I’m a bad image of yourself.

What oppresses me is the glance that strives to possess but to possess me it is prepared to erase me. How many of these glances assail me, every moment, in the street? To the glance of he who made me invisible and with no existence for years, I owe the experience of a journey to the land of neverborn. Is this the way, as I did, strangers, convicts, and mad people live?

Are we to see but not to be seen – all reduced to this- by the beholder’s eye that impends us every time and everywhere? No regulation is innocent, not even the one that judges my image.

Violence of "snaps", sold to the eye of the stronger ones. Impaired relation between he who sees and is seen , betrayed by he who photographs and he who will look at it, betrayed even by itself. Pathetic is he who glances from his mortuary pose. Uncautious submission.

Don’t suffer this regulalation: first step. To the one who stole the images that represernt me I say no, and I say no to those that took photography away from me, its essence of revelation and caress, its tightening through embrace, its desire to tell a tale.

To the cages of likeliness I say no, and to those who enclose me in gender, roles, ages. I say no to the glances that don’t keep me in mind: here and now, I gender, race, culture, I woman, man, adult , girl, baby girl, old lady, I. I say no to those who stone me in grave-like poses.

I flip through the picture book that depicts me along the path of my existence yet I only appear once in a while. I can’t trace myself in pictures that depict me, no object, not even a chair, a record, a book, I don’t see anyone, I hardly believe I am myself. I’d like to be depicted in a long sequence, a story, several stories, to speak what I think, see, do, and watch those parts of me that never had words: hands, legs, feet, ears, nose, mouth, teeth, etc. I’d like it never to be defined so that whoever sees me depicted in one of these images may not say: "I know you."

Correspondences, affinities and harmonies: this is the gift of some photographers, companions of this journey inside another representation.

I thank you Luigi Ghirri for the feeling of seeing as if for the first time. Your looks, that make nothing a given fact, full of memories and compassion, astonishment and amazement have revealed another me.

The unveiled mystery in your photographs moves me . You look at the sea, the sky, an image, a person without ever assuming to impose limits or boundaries. Your look invites me to go beyond, to discover with my own eyes. It is a patient look that goes back and back again to what it loves, to see a different face, an unknown detail. It surprises itself time and again of what it has discovered. It is a look that never tires, not even the eyes are closed, and to what was seen we associate remembrance. I emerge from forgetfulness, I become visible once again. I see myself open to possibility and mutation, I see myself here , in this place, in a time; I see other bodies next to mine and other glances, I see the spaces that represent them and display me, I see myself seen as I see.

I see myself in a bed, in a room, a house, a city, a car, while I walk and am still, I observe, I listen, I turn around, speed up, slow down, I stop. Those places are me; on the walls I recover traces of my life. I look at the facades of houses, searching for clues: a shutter, a doorhandle, a grating, a plaster statue in a garden, the car in a garage. They’re your signs, those that reveal your self to me. I wander past the walls of your house, through the streets of your city and I recognize you.

I see women leaning over banisters looking at the sea or the sky, men and women walking towards the horizon. The land is a friend of their steps and so are the trees, the walls, the facades, the asphalt. I see them amidst the people in the game of exchanging looks and signs of agreement. I see them different every time, morning, evening, dusk, dawn. I see them and never end my discovery of them.

We walk on winter beaches and city sidewalks, aware of being looked at from every angle: images amid images.

The men and women that Luigi Ghirri shoots are defending themselves from the presumption of seeing all and well, with clarity. Therefore they love weather conditions, fog or night, in which seeing isn’t such a foregone conclusion as it is in daylight. And they love looking in the ponds where the world sways upside-down and in the mirrors where everything is doubled or tripled and in the picture books and atlases where the eyes look at what other eyes have seen.

Since I’ve understood the fact of my being, like them, an image that looks, I want to to know how I’m looked upon and how I can look; I want to learn to look since nothing I’ve seen so far has been with my own eyes.

I start from the body, the place closest to me, my house, my home, me, my surface and container, containing, me.

I don’t recognize myself except through the images that others cast on me; I am unable to see myself if not through them. Them: who?

Who looked at me so far and how?

Luigi Ghirri’s pictures have freed me of the weight of judging eyes, they’ve rid me of the nightmare of face-on portraits, of the obligation of absent glances that stare at someone they’ll never see- they’ve given my other self back to me, back towards me, while it goes away- They’ve helped me know myself; entirely, every single part, related to who is next to me, over, under, inside the times and spaces in which I live.

Glances that have returned images of myself that I used to ignore; they have fed others.

I see you and myself in the photographs of Imogen Cunningham.

Between my toes and my nipples I rediscover a friendship that I was never aware of. I stop to look and observe the resemblances and contrasts: a recollection of each other that makes you shrug and fold your hand in the shape of a half-circle. It’s a story I want to know. The pieces of the body chopped to bits have tied new alliances and ways of being: hands to support the shoulders, read, dance; hands or diary pages. Imogen’s photography sews up the body’s unsewn pieces and capsizes its symbolic image. Every limb, pore, mole and hair starts a tale. The great toes of the right and the left foot arch themselves, stretch and open, are about to split but the old friendship that ties the heels gives them rest. Fingers and toes pray together at a certain time. Reflections, shadows redesign bodies over bodies and stories over stories.

I perceive clashes between a nose and a humerus, an ear and a mole, between hair and freckles, a breast and its shadow on the wall, a nipple and the shadow of an arm on the chest. It is a conversation between ear and neck creases.

The more isolated the fragments the more they reveal. A foot can tell an entire existence.

The body’s surface again becomes skin with its alphabet of scars, moles, hair and freckles to decipher.

After seeing these pictures, I look at myself again, I strain to hear the reasons of big toe, elbow, teeth and all the rest. I introduce myself to the parts of my body, I recover them, recognize them and myself.

I tell stories of alien organs, hybrid pieces, drifted, equal and different pieces of flesh, chips, punctures, valves and bones, veins, blood and silix. Forgetful and greatly gifted pieces, succubus and hegemonic. A pair of legs, a mouth, a by-pass, a microchip.

I tell the story of being extraneous to myself, of when I had my fake stomach, breast, nose, and skin done, to be reborn my perfect copy or myself in a fake uterus. A cloned me or myself? Whoever I am, now I’m different. Every piece of me hears, speaks, thinks, reasons and has many stories to tell. No more anatomies to look at, to make others look at, to show or show off to, screen on which to project my false identity.

I cohabited with my body without knowing it and I believed it to be the only one possible. I set travelling long limbs and apparati, articulations and systems; I cross it, know it, and in order not to lose myself I set to work: I’m tracing its maps.

Orlan..:" The next surgery will probably take place in Japan where I’ll implant an exaggeratedly big nose; it’ll be the biggest possible nose, keeping in mind my body’s anatomy among with the deontologically bearable rules of Japanese doctors… Cosmetic surgery can be of great help; it obviously has to be a free choice, and after all social pressure mustn’t prevail over individual desire or own self-portrait… Are we still perhaps convinced of bending to nature’s needs, this lottery of genius handed out by chance?

My work is struggling against the unborn, the inexorable, the programmed, the DNA (our direct rival as a director of representation) and God.

You can say, then that my work is blasphemous.

Hands to open and close, hands to show, hands to hide. The hands of Shirin Neshat speak; on the mouth they speak astonishment; speak holding their tongue, hands like books of the other story, never written, never read. Hands veil the face and unveil the unspeakable.

Hands to receive, hands to fire, hands covered in blood, blackened with ink, hands for peace and war, hands to caress and harm.

Hands cover the face to conceal weeping, they arch on the nose to speak astonishment, hands on the mouth against fright, index and middle finger on the lips of a face that denies itself to looks of others. Hand that prays, receives, calls, rejects. Hand that holds another one. Hands that are open, closed, wide open, wide shut.

Shirin’s hands are not innocent.

They receive and fire: hands of mother assassin, hands of mother warrior. Hands of a mother and antique Iranian woman, submitted and rebellish, active and passive, public and private woman.

Woman of great jests, body of a woman as site for tokens; hands of a woman in act. Shirin, interpreter and director of her own self-representations, looks at herself as a traditional Islamic man and, nowadays, a New Yorker would. But she also looks at herself with her own eyes, starting from her origins, amid Manhattan’s skyscrapers, there, where she lives. Her image, though, is hardly able to find shape: Shirin doesn’t recognize herself in the figure that gives back her past, nor in the one that comes from the present. In one case or the other, the woman that they show her is an exile from herself, when her body is concealed by black cloaks and overexposed to commercial icons.

Shirin starts again from the staging of an image that sums up various representations. Every self-portrait contains different figures, characters, roles as in reality. Neither pacifying nor idealistic, her image emphasizes lacerations that crush people. Nor can he and she, portrayed together, look at each other; profiles intersect themselves, but the eyes, turned somewhere else, like their lives.

Starting as a place of suffered manipulation, the body becomes site of deliberate representation. The photographs of hands, feet, eyes, faces, arms, tell stories of life and death, submission and rebellion, slavery and resistance. The palm is a page of verse and the back is a canvas of signs. Fingers arch, extend, spread, bend and add new words to the conversation.

The exhibition of totally fake bodies stimulates questions: who was I, who am I, who could I be?

How to recognize, choose and regenerate myself?

Shirin displays mutation as a reinvention of herself. But another vision of the body is what reunites them. Her hands, face, eyes, feet and clothes don’t live to be looked at; her eyes neither wink nor refuse to look, yet they point far away, staring ahead, hieratic, detached. They speak of other times and places. Minute writings fill in the space around the iris: eyes ask to be read, evoking an antique and unsatisfied share of desire. Every part of her body recalls the ones of the other, every limb and organ for communication: obsolete practice between human now inhuman.

Herefore her hands aren’t of woman or man, good or bad, pretty or ugly; Shirin’s hands are alive.

I stare at those and then at mine. I notice for the first time how many things my hands can say and do that they’ve never said and done. I stare at those hands in black and white and learn their amputations. How many times have they cut my hands?

I, accomplice of my own impairments, what can I tell you?

In the winter, as a little girl, I always had chapped hands. I touched my coarse skin and was sad.

I have wide hands with squared out fingers; my nails are tapering and look like my father’s. Every time I came back from school- and she still does it today- my mother used to say: wash your hands, and if she saw me put something in my mouth during the day she would ask me apprehensively: have you washed your hands? My mother’s opinion of the body has always disturbed me because I used to dirty my hands. And not only those.

When I was a girl I liked nail polish and since I didn’t know how to apply it I would get myself dirty and go around with red- spotted fingers. I didn’t really realize what painting your nails meant, but it made me feel older. At the beauty salon I’d see fingers wet in basins full of water and soap, of the women who gave manicures, to show their friends that they didn’t wash dishes. To show one thing, erase another.

I started noticing this discomfort at age 12 or 13: I remember the horror in front of that body, my own; I wished it weren’t mine, so different from the ones in magazines.

I didn’t know at the time that my hands, legs, nose and mouth, were what I had to learn to know and love. I erased them, wearing other legs, noses, mouths, and hands. I would cut one piece after another out of magazines and fill myself with desire for them. I was never like I always wanted to be (those perfect figures dictated law from the walls of the city): I couldn’t bare the comparison. To hide from my site and the other’s; nothing left to do but camouflage myself a little bit at a time, erasing every piece of me.

My hands now say what other parts of the body conceal. What speaks are certain light brown spots and the swollen veins on my back. Hands are what keep me attached to the earth, hold my head up when I’m tired, and cover my ears when there’s too much noise.

Hands give me back the limits of body, time and space. With my hands I measure the width of my room: ten palms, twenty. With my fingers I count the days go by.

I swell up, deflate, feel bad; I’m hard, flabby, stretched. The doctor touches me, the gastroenterologist prods me, the gynecologist drums me, scours me, looks at me from within and projects me on a screen, not even flesh, just black and white dots with clots here and there: hindrances to sight and hearing: a scan.

Lying down on the hospital bed you stay still, looking at pictures on the monitor, unrelated. Even the doctor’s words are unrelated. Not even me, your belly, still feel yours. You look around and ask, did you take my belly?

I’ve been empty for many years. For how long have you been scared of a heart inside me?

A woman is a woman, only if she gives birth to children. No. You first wanted to give birth to yourself.

It wasn’t the fear of brutalizing you that keeps me empty. You didn’t even know what stretch marks were. It wasn’t the pain of delivery, or the fear of a crippled child. Not even the fear of gashes, lacerations, holes in the uterus, cuts in the vagina.

At the time they hadn’t even told you that a woman isn’t even a cow on the delivery bed, not even a sack of potatoes: it’s a belly to empty and no fuss about it.

You were afraid of dying. How many mothers did you see limp from the weight of their bellies? You were afraid of being erased. You look at yourself in a mirror, I just told you: the pregnant body is infected. Is this what the scholars have written? You look and like yourself.

Your not agreeing is dangerous. Isn’t your turgid belly obscene? You love the excess of your stomach. The body that I carry inside me skims my skin. I feel the passage of air in the placenta and the sliding of food, blood, oxygen, flesh for his mouth. He rolls in water, straightens up, stretches out, eats, sleeps; each of his gestures reaches me with a caress.

I look at myself in the mirror and in the shadow on the wall. I’m two and one, same and different, myself and other. I share two sexes, two blood groups, two destinies, two ages, I measure his and my time: a week, a month, two, three.

The beginning and the end no longer coincide with my birth and death. My blood, skin, shape, weight, and size change. My body opens and closes: it doubles.

Alive: I look at myself in the mirror, today I’m not like tomorrow and yesterday I’m not like today. I change, the others change, I give, the others give me.

The time that goes by brings me closer to competitiveness. I don’t just see with my eyes and the light. I see in the creases of my skin and everything to me appears to be the opposite of what it really is. I look at the pregnant belly of Piero della Francesca’s "Madonna": an idol.

I look at the pregnant woman of Goustave Klimt, cold in the erotic offer of her stomach.

I look at the pregnant bellies in the pictures of Imogen, bodies without faces; seated, stretched, straight bodies and bellies, up close, to fill your eyes.

Your first feeling is of intoxication; I’m air-drunk after being inside for so long.

Astonishment and mystery: How can a belly become this big, how can a body bear it?

There’s energy in the picture. A memory surfaces. I can hardly believe I’ve also been this way. I photographed myself, secretly, a summer afternoon: I photographed my pregnant shadow on the wall. I wouldn’t have dared to photograph my naked and pregnant body, nor would I have asked someone to take a picture. Whoever met me would turn their eyes away: was I stout, unpleasant, repugnant?

I felt a deep pleasure while looking at myself and I’d start in front of small and large changes in my belly, eyes, hair, complexion. I was proud. I look at the pregnant bellies in pornographic magazines. I look at them in commercials. Obscene practices with no scruples perpetuate on the pregnant stomach.

Doesn’t exist (As the psychoanalytic theory recites.)

They say that soon after a woman has given birth to a child (when the umbilical cord has not been cut and the placenta expelled) we have visions. A woman came out of the delivery room repeating "God exists."

Another dreamt of arising soon after delivery with a desire to cook placenta (that she had just expelled, wanting to eat it.) She did it right after cutting it into pieces and cooking it in a pan: what a great smell! She thought this was what a woman ought to do after delivery.

She woke up and asked that they pack the placenta because she wanted to eat it.

They looked at her in disgust.

The placenta had already been sealed in cellophane and sent to a pharmaceutical company to be transformed into wrinkle cream.

Women were born from the rib of a man called Adam who besides being the first man was a superman, since one piece of him was enough to procreate everything.

Bellies full of beer, fat on the stomach of slovenly men.

If a man’s got a full belly they say he’s a pig.

Bellies filled with food make men think of life. It’s the ultimate attempt to get pregnant by eating.

Blind with rage they take their revenge: the stomach of pregnant women is inhabited by a corpse- they say-.