Ferran Capo made the art direction of this piece conceptualized by Clim & Marta Riudavets
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Confessions
by Ferran Capo
We Are Only Bodies.
X Confessions.
Adriana Eskenazi.
Erika Lust.
Adriana Eskenazi is one of the people in Barcelona I like best. She’s always late, but she takes beautiful photographs and she’s my friend, so I can’t ask for more.
One of her clients is Erika Lust, the Barcelona production company that has made a name for itself with the motto “porn for women,” feminine and feminist. A not very common declaration of principles in the industry of adult films, and that Erika Lust tries to follow to a T. To begin with, during the shooting there were almost exclusively women, from the director to her assistant, the focus puller and the director of photography. I’d say the only exception were the electricians.
Erika Lust offered Adriana the possibility of directing one of her X Confessions, a series of short films with explicit sex. When Adriana told me about it, I offered to create the title credits. For a while I’d been wanting to do something with projections on naked bodies and this seemed like a good opportunity.
I tested different liquids, abstract lines, colours and typographies. The first proposals played with vertical, diagonal and horizontal lines which criss-crossed uncovering the names of the members of the team. In general, I work with lots of colour, and so my first idea went in that direction, but the short film went in the opposite one: not much light, almost monochrome. So we decided to change it and do it all in black and white. ‘X’ is the universal symbol for explicit sex and these short films are framed within a series called X Confessions, so everything made sense.
I wanted everything to be soft: fixed shots of parts of the body and typographies that were discovered by playing with lines that formed different X’s. I wanted the sensual shapes of the bodies to be only partly visible, with backlit images or very soft lighting, and for the lines forming the X’s to finally give our eyes the information of the shapes of the bodies. I wanted it to be sensual and soft, more erotic, to contrast the explicitness of the rest of the video. I liked the idea that, for the first few seconds, some shapes appeared as confusing, almost as abstract forms or as landscapes more than bodies.
It’s quite clear that at a creative level this isn’t radically new: there are lots of photographs of nudes with lines projected over them on the internet, and the reference to Saul Bass and his use of projections of typographies over bodies is evident, but I still think it was a good visual exercise. I would have liked to have been able to devote more time to the process, but due to shooting timings I had but half an hour to make them all, and even though all the shots were planned, they ended up being a bit more improvised than I wanted them to be and I couldn’t play so much with the hands and body movements of the actors while they showed themselves or hid the credits.
