Daydream
Elisa Medde

Daydream is an intimate and attentive exploration of sexuality, embodiment, and the desire for connection within spaces shaped by performance and consumption. Developed following the artist’s return to Portugal, the project begins with an encounter with places often situated at the margins of public discourse: sex shops, peep shows, porn booths, strip clubs, and love motels. Rather than approaching these environments through spectacle or judgment, the work engages them with curiosity, attending to their emotional, symbolic, and spatial charge.

Even when unoccupied, these interiors are far from neutral. They are saturated with representations: fragmented bodies, cropped and flattened into images, endlessly repeated. Desire appears mediated, displaced, and abstracted, lingering as a trace rather than a presence. These spaces construct intimacy as something staged and transactional, designed to be consumed through distance and anonymity.

Within this context, the artist’s body enters the frame as both subject and site of inquiry. Through performative gestures and postures observed in these environments, the work re-enacts the visual language embedded within them. Yet this re-enactment does not resolve into identification. Instead, it exposes a dissonance between the roles these spaces propose and the lived experience of inhabiting them. The gestures resist full embodiment, revealing themselves as scripts produced for an external gaze; fantasies structured for someone else, rather than expressions emerging from within the body itself.

Crucially, these representations are not presented as alien or imposed from the outside. They are recognisable, deeply internalised, and shaped over time through cultural repetition. Daydream acknowledges how such images inform understandings of desirability, intimacy, and relationality, even when they feel distant or inadequate. The project unfolds within this tension, confronting the gap between absorbed ideals and embodied experience.

Photography operates here not as a means of documentation, but as a tool for navigation. Intuition guides the process, allowing each image to function simultaneously as a question and a provisional response. The work resists closure, remaining open-ended and attentive to uncertainty.

As the project evolves, the spaces it inhabits begin to shift. From explicitly commercial and performative sites, the work moves toward more private interiors: first love motels, both public and secluded, and eventually the bedroom. This spatial transition signals an inward movement, where exposure gives way to vulnerability. Themes of loneliness, inadequacy, and longing coexist with moments of curiosity and desire, opening the possibility for a more sincere and embodied relationship with intimacy.

Daydream does not seek to moralise or condemn these environments. Instead, it asks how broader systems reduce bodies to commodities, intimacy to performance, and connection to transaction. The title suggests not an unconscious escape, but a deliberate act — a chosen fantasy that creates space for softness, contradiction, and doubt.

Positioned between critique and longing, Daydream holds intimacy as something unresolved and fragile. It gestures toward the possibility of reclaiming agency within structures that so often dictate how desire should look, feel, and be performed, offering a quiet but insistent search for connection in a world already heavily scripted.

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