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XY XX
2014
An inner courtyard faces a row of rooms where prostitutes take their clients. At an opposite window, the photographer witnesses what should remain unseen. Prostitution does not exist in the absence of a legal framework that lays down the limits of something that is public knowledge. In this context, sex becomes another control mechanism of the system. In a nation-state that is progressively losing its sovereignty to the pervasive forms of capitalism, it can no longer regulate interactions between people (through police, army, etc.), but rules directly over human nature. Everything can be bought; everybody is at risk of being occupied and destroyed.
The digital noise ends up gobbling bodies, exhausting them until they are violently devoured. The flesh, tyrannized, becomes pixels, just abstract data devoid of any human quality. This shattered body is the battlefield on which the prostitutes defend themselves in their dark and never-ending nightmare.
This overwhelming noise, this sticky mass that unforgivably drags us along, is also our own unconscious. It is a place where we don’t want to be, surrounded by voices we don't want to hear. It is a place that we know exists but we don't want to see.
XY XX book
ISBN 978-84-617-0316-6
Dalpine, 2014
Editing: Fosi Vegue and Eloi Gimeno
Design: Eloi Gimeno
Prepress: Víctor Garrido (La Troupe)
Print: Artes Gráficas Palermo
108 pages
24 x 16 cm





Photography 2.0 Exhibition
PHotoEspaña'14
Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid.
Curated by Joan Fontcuberta
Photography 2.0 explores the changes taking place in Spanish photography in the context of mass image production, globalisation and post-capitalism. It focuses on these changes through an examination of the situation, where a whole new wave of young photographers are currently engaged in a critical appraisal of the new state of affairs.



Joan Fontcuberta on XY XX
In 1942, Alfred Hitchcok's Rear Window glorified our fascination with peeping through the neighbours' windows. Over half a century later, our beloved junk TV has accustomed us to the basic idea behind the reality show: to make a spectacle of ALL the details of our lives and those of others, pushing us to take part in a visual orgy in which absolutely EVERYTHING is on show.
Fosi Vegue observes the events unfolding through the windows of a common courtyard: rooms used by prostitutes and their clients, summer nights, blinds up to let in the breeze... XY XX (2014) is a starling update of Merry Alpern's Dirty Windows, highlighting the exent to which post-photography blends snooping, spying and surveillance. In a challenge to desacralised ethics and prudish legislation, the picture is stolen, privacy is invaded.
Throwing off the bonds that govern the legitimacy of the visible, in a kind of exacerbated voyeurism, Vegue embarks on a stark exploration of "sex as the catalyst of our instincts, our desires and our contradictions... Sex as a control system". Passion and pleasure trigger a fusion of flesh, heat and emotions, that in XY XX is also linked to a certain code, the code of digital photography, ever-present in the attendant "noise": pixellation and blurring hint at the inaccuracy of the webcam and the innocence of the amateur, factors which when taken as rhetorical are read as the naked truth, in real time.