Double
2016—2017
Rita Lino is a Portuguese photographer whose work explores ideas of self and persona, using the body “as primer matter to be re-created and beautifully exorcised” (…) the photographic act pared back to a basic schema of a model and clothing. Each of these elements is subject to a kind of sabotage. Lino’s own physical attractiveness is at variance with her evident unease. When her face appears in the photographes, which it does frequently, her expression is troubling: strained, agitated, worried, exhausted. Most of her poses- bending or toppling over her backwards, balancing in on one leg or on the back of her heels – look uncomfortable and precarious. Physically and emotionally, she seems unbalanced. (...)
Her performance is sweaty and uncomfortable, a parody of femininity and a deliberate staging of “faulty empathy”. To borrow Mortensen’s words, 10 seconds presents a femenine ideal that’s is “all wrong”. Here, it is not the pose -the visible inscription of meaning of the body- that is put under scrutiny, but the act of posing itself . 10 seconds stages the performance of femininity as physically unsettling and emotionally distressing.” (Eugenie Shinkle in the “The Feminine awkward: Graceless bodies and the performance of femininity in fashion photographs”)