Eleonora Roaro
LUCE ROSSA! LUCE ROSSA!
19 April – 17 May 2026
Opening: Sunday, 19 April 2026, 6:30–8:30 pm
Once upon a time, there was porn cinema. The Majestic Sexi Movie, Milan’s first porn theatre (in Italian “film a luci rosse”, literally “red-light cinema”)—opened in 1977 and closed in 1992—announced its programme with a flashing red light and the warning: “Images not suitable for a sensitive audience.” Desire, withdrawn from the view, took shape in the gap between prohibition and exposure, mediated by titles, warnings, and intermittent lights. The disappearance of “red-light” cinemas with the advent of home video marks not only a technological shift but a transformation in the scopic regime: viewing becomes private, continuous, and de-situated. The ritual and proximity of bodies vanish, along with their charge of risk, embarrassment, and mutual exposure. Desire is reconfigured as immediate access, without threshold. It is within this reconfiguration of the gaze that Eleonora Roaro’s work operates, reintroducing a distance that is not nostalgic but functions as a critical apparatus: a staging of the conditions of contemporary vision.
In LUCE ROSSA! LUCE ROSSA! the erotic, historically tied to an excess of the visible, is reconfigured in a language that is legible yet normalised. The installation revisits and disarticulates the dispositif of the Majestic: poster, warning, flashing light, and, on the monitor, I pornogiochi delle femmine svedesi (1971; originally Suburban Wives), the first film screened in the theatre. The film, in its original duration, is entirely translated into textual language by artificial intelligence according to a framework defined by the artist. The AI looks without seeing, recognises without experience, and produces a language that does not adhere to bodies: a pure syntax in which the image survives as description. Cinema re- emerges as archive and as ghost: images persist as traces that, once recoded, become captions, deprived of vision. This necessarily imperfect translatability turns the work into a site of friction, inhabiting the gap between image and text, vision and description, desire and algorithm. By withdrawing the image, Roaro reveals the conditions of the its survival—that is, the impossibility of experiencing the work outside a system that translates, organises, and renders it legible. It is precisely there, where vision no longer coincides with the mere act of seeing, that the gaze still persists.
SUBPLACE is an unconventional space that coexists with the ordinary and the contingent. It brings the visual languages of art—conceived as an alternative to the logic of production and consumption—into a site of transit, within the flow of everyday life. Here, art becomes an opportunity for a direct and personal aesthetic experience, free from mediation or layered interpretation, for an audience that may unexpectedly “stumble upon” the work along its habitual path.
The name refers to its underground location in the mezzanine of Villapizzone Station. The “display window” functions as an experiment in public art, hosting site-specific projects by artists and presenting installations, sculptures, videos, and paintings.
The project is self-managed and entirely self-funded and curated by Joykix Hydra Mentale (Fabrizio Longo) and Rossella Moratto.
SUBPLACE – Stazione del Passante Ferroviario di Villapizzone, via Arnaldo Fusinato 20156 Milano (MI)
https://subplace.jimdosite.com | info: subplacemilano@gmail.com | IG: subplacemilano