Eva & Franco Mattes
Hannah Uncut
Hannah Uncut, 2021
Video, 52 min, 3840 x 2160 px, sound,
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur
2021-001-001
© Eva & Franco Mattes, Foto: Melania Dalle Grave & Piercarlo Quecchia für DSL Studio
both *1976 (Brescia, IT), live and work in New York, US
Hannah Uncut, 2021It’s with our smartphones that we capture our life in all its authenticity: all the selfie attempts that didn’t make it onto Instagram, the casual screenshots that we save as mementos or the meme we send around on social media. It’s the trial and error, the blurred shots and misframed angles that give a sense of our lives being lived. For Hannah Uncut, a work commissioned by Fotomuseum Winterthur for the exhibition Dear Imaginary Audience, Eva & Franco Mattes offered to pay USD 1,000 to anyone willing to sell their phone with all the pictures on it – thus making their private image archive accessible to the interpretation of strangers. They selected Hannah from the UK, a woman in her late twenties whose life and personality unfolds through a slide show of images that accumulated over eight months – in chronological order and completely unedited. The only artistic intervention is the rhythm of the images, emulating the pace at which we swipe through our phones. Hannah’s pictures show the evolution of photographic forms of communication and enactment associated with the mass diffusion of social media and smartphones. Hannah, a child of Generation Y, uses screen-shots as a matter of course, just as she applies face filters to her selfies and plays with an expanded visual vocabulary that is geared towards sharing her images online. As such, Hannah’s photo archive lays bare the construction and curation of the self – permeated by moments of authenticity and intimacy that unavoidably catapult us into the role of voyeurs.