Performance.
January 21, 2026. Duration: 40 minutes.
In collaboration with Martino Santori.
Inkjet printing on soap sheets, water.
Viasaterna Arte Contemporanea, Milan, IT

Ph. Pietro Agostini

Standard Cleaning is a performance that explores the operational and temporary nature of contemporary images, understood not merely as representations, but as devices capable of connecting gestures, bodies, and distant places. The work originated from a series of domestic cleaning actions carried out by Martino Santori in Marseille, which were recorded and broken down into individual frames. The images depicted corners, surfaces, and residues, preserving traces of gestures already performed. Like dust that has been removed, they made something perceptible through its absence, oscillating between visibility and disappearance.

I transferred the frames onto sheets of soap, arranging them into three acts. During the performance, I used these sheets to wash my body, progressively dissolving the images into foam. The cleaning of a space was thus reactivated through the cleaning of the body, while each image became a material to be consumed. Its duration depended on the intensity and rhythm of my gestures. From a distance, in Marseille, Santori modulated my actions through a live recitation of a poetic text. His voice guided their timing and intensity, establishing a relationship of co-dependence between two bodies that did not share the same space. The images became temporary surfaces of connection between separate actions, without those actions ever fully coinciding.

The performance thus articulated a threefold process of cleaning involving space, body, and images. The images were not destroyed to negate their meaning, but consumed through their very function. Their disappearance coincided with the completion of the gesture that had brought them back into presence.