Eva and Franco Mattes: Riccardo Uncut

For Riccardo Uncut, artists Eva and Franco Mattes posted a call on social media offering to buy someone’s phone for $1,000 in order to turn the photo and video contents into an art project. A customized, chronological slideshow, the work gives viewers a unique glimpse into the personal life of the chosen applicant, Riccardo. The project mined an archive of approximately three thousand images taken between 2004 and 2017 of travels and vacations, friends and family, partners and sexual desires, daily life at home, office dynamics, food, art, architecture, and artistic endeavors. The song accompanying the work, from the soundtrack of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film Querelle, also appears as background music in one of Riccardo’s videos.

Social media offers a perfect arena for re-creating the self as a lifestyle brand, a virtual space for performing a daily “me,” an idealized version of ourselves. With Riccardo Uncut, the artists investigate where one might still find authenticity in self-representation and an unedited version of the self. The phone owner’s willingness to sell the raw documentation of his personal life also astutely mirrors social media platforms’ terms of service, in which users assume all liability for the content of posted images. Riccardo Uncut continues the explorations of privacy, transparency, voyeurism, and exhibitionism that Eva and Franco Mattes pursued in their projects Life Sharing (2000–2003) and The Others (2011).