Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore [Love Meetings] (1964) unfolds a tapestry of psychological truths captured through direct, unflinching questions posed on the streets of Italy. He lays bare the complexities of the public’s attitudes toward sexuality and the uneasy tension between tradition and modernity. In confronting the discomforts surrounding intimate yet public themes, the film reveals the deep-seated anxieties and moral conflicts that lurk beneath everyday life.
More than fifty years later, Sharon Hayes isolates and expands on Pasolini’s questioning style and shot compositions to interview individuals and groups for her video series Ricerche [Research] (2019-2024). In Ricerche, she offers a thought-provoking reflection on the power of public conversation, using candid, unscripted dialogue to explore the intersections of personal experience, political discourse, and societal norms. Ultimately, she exposes the intricate web of unspoken truths that shape human relationships and identity through these unreserved exchanges.
Hayes weaves complex layers of intimacy, politics, and identity through forms of documentary and performance. In Ricerche, she engages deeply with language, often using it as a tool to create an aesthetic of tension – between the spoken word and silence, between public and private spheres, and between individual experience and collective history. There’s an underlying rhythm in her work, a pacing that both challenges and stretches the viewer’s perception of time, meaning, and experience, elevating the mundane to the realm of the profound. Throughout her four-part series, Hayes pushes the boundaries of documentaries and performances into an unfiltered view of humanity.
In an era in which street interviews are a daily fixture on digital social platforms, Hayes’s meticulous archival process and candid interviews challenge the boundaries of love, intimacy, and the politics surrounding sexuality, urging viewers to confront the contradictions of our own desires and social structures. Ricerche invites us to witness the complexity of human experience, in which every word and silence carries the weight of both the individual and the collective, the private and the public. In its poetic ambiguity, Hayes beckons us to reflect on how we speak, love, and remember, leaving us with the lingering question: how do we navigate the spaces between us?
