RED – Manual for a withdrawing body

RED – Manual for a Disappearing Body is a performance and installation referencing Italian Giallo cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Trenchcoats, gloved hands, and unstable points of view define the genre’s eroticised imagery, particularly in representations of femicide. Working against these historically violent narratives, Kitty Maria and Elise Ehry place their own bodies at the centre of the mise-en-scène.

Presented in the storefront window of Swimming Pool Gallery in Berlin, the performance takes place inside the gallery while the audience watches from the street. The window functions as both barrier and cinematic screen, placing viewers in a voyeuristic position and echoing the visual tension of Giallo, particularly in films such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970). The artists reactivate these visual codes to question contemporary regimes of visibility and surveillance.

RED is the second chapter of a performance project initiated in Amsterdam in 2025 with BLU – The Storm Behind the Window. This iteration expands the performative and sculptural language of the original work while deepening its focus on glass, transparency, and disappearance. Glass sculptures and holographic devices allow the performers’ bodies to oscillate between presence and dissolution.

Through choreographed gestures, uniforms, and handcrafted props, the artists produce a feminist re-reading of the genre that exposes and destabilises voyeuristic visual structures. Visible from the street even outside performance hours, the installation transforms the vitrine into a hybrid stage, exhibition, and suspended crime scene, where passers-by become witnesses unable to intervene.