PHOTOROMANCE: Staging the Saga of Our Aspirations

The Photoromance project arose from a number of intense exchanges and conversations within the context of the Micropolitics Research Group and other research and activist networks currently concerned with the spreading phenomenon of free labour. In order to contribute to an ongoing process of research around such practices as internships, job placements and voluntary work, we identified in the format of the Photoromance a powerful tool for reflection and activation.

PHOTOROMANCE
Photoromances became really popular in Italy in the Fifties, as a cheap form of entertainment. Emblematic still frames were extracted from famous movies and printed in a sequence to form a photographic novel, as a cheaper and more accessible version of the movie. Brief texts would then be added to the pictures to replace the dialogues. From this initial phase the genre acquired its own independent cycle of production, separate from the movies industry. In the 60s and 70s photoromances sold by the millions, and their actors were recognised as popular stars.

Many commentators claim that photoromances, due to their appealing format that united text and pictures, played an important role in the alphabetisation process of large numbers of women. An ever bigger claim has been made by Anna Bravo, who has recently unveiled the correspondence between female factory workers who were active in trade union and feminist political activism and their consumption of photoromances. Apparently those who bought them were also among the more active in their political life. The author identifies in the type of thematic that populated the plots of photoromance the seeds that gave women a desire for more adventurous lives, more intense passions and ultimately more freedom, like the heroines of the genre.

LOVE
The content of photoromances has traditionally been love, and how love intertwines and is affected by all the other dimensions of life, such as class, morals, death etc. In the Photoromance project, the topic of love re-emerges under the guise of passion, passion for one’s job or passion for one’s ‘thing’. It is ultimately this desire that has become a crucial mechanism of the gratuitous productive cycle. It is from here, from the intimate aspirations of young people, thus, that we must begin to rethink it.

In proposing participants to engage in the production of a photoromance around free labour, we also drew inspiration from Augusto Boal’s use of the ‘gestural tableau’ exercise in the context of his Theatre of the Oppressed technique. By having to physically embody a scene, having to stage it for others to understand its meaning, forces us to focus on the minute gestures, expressions and posturings that render power dynamics manifest.