Lending the face. Lazy Sunday by Emilio Vavarella

THE ITALIAN JOB – Job n. 3, Lazy Sunday (2021) is an artwork by Italian artist and researcher Emilio Vavarella (Monfalcone, 1989). It consists of a 12-hour film made with a 360-degree camera positioned on his head, with which he filmed the events of a summer Sunday, recording his day from waking up until the evening. The work, available through a virtual reality helmet, is a sort of self-portrait in which, however, the artist’s face almost never appears. It is, in effect, physically replaced by that of the spectator, who assumes his point of view and also an augmented perspective on the space Vavarella occupies and moves through during the day. The spectator only occasionally encounters Vavarella’s face, which he looks at (or turns his gaze back on himself?) in the mirrors or reflective surfaces he comes across. In analysing this artwork, the essay focuses on two aspects. Firstly, the viewer experiences a faceless self-portrait, a body without a head, whose iconography can be compared to that of the decapitated portrait or the painting of a head without body; it is also the symbolic form of the first person shot and its more experimental use in cinema. Secondly, we witness a chimaerical substitution of the phantasmatic face of the artist. This is the focal point of the work and of the experience in the 360-degree image-world, but here it is replaced with the flesh and blood face of the spectators wearing virtual reality helmets and themselves put on display in the physical space of the installation.