The project was created by third-year students (school year 2025-2026) in the Cultural and Performing Arts program at IPC Einaudi.
In exploring the theme ABITO, the students combined photography and audiovisual media to create a visual journey with a dual nature. On the one hand, the works are a powerful form of individual expression: through the fluidity of the veil in the tub or the fragmentation of the collages, each artist explores the vulnerability of their own identity and skin. On the other hand, the project culminates in a social and collective narrative: in the poetic image of houses taking flight, the students give voice to a shared need for freedom and redemption.
From the private veil to the collective flight, the students at Einaudi use the lens to inhabit the present, intimately linking the search for the self to the discovery of the other.
Ecdysis - La pelle che abito [Ecdysis - The Skin I Live In] (2026)
What defines the boundary between who we are and the space we occupy? Our project explores “clothing” as a garment of identity and lived architecture. The chosen title, Ecdysis—the biological molting of insects and reptiles—evokes the vital need to shed an old shell in order to redefine our presence in the world.
The journey begins in an amniotic dimension altered by the laws of inverted perspective and inspired by Philippe Ramette. Submerged in a tank that defies ordinary gravity, a figure is enveloped by a fluid veil: a “zero degree” of the garment that safeguards potential identity. But entering the world is a trauma: being torn out of it happens violently, and that first ideal garment is ripped apart, forcing us to don the social masks required by the circumstances.
From this wound, identity fragments through play. We reference Almodóvar’s masterpiece, The Skin I Live In, but we subvert its somber atmosphere. Through collage portraits imbued with irony and Dadaist spirit, we deconstruct the face into overlapping planes. The self ceases to be a prison: it becomes a playful deconstruction in which the walls seem almost to “wear” the people, subverting the classical portrait with an irreverent smile.
The rejection of the confines of reality ultimately extends to space itself. Drawing inspiration from the magical realism of De Sica’s masterpiece Miracle in Milan, our walls detach from their foundations and float. Once the ecdysis is complete, the domestic environment is decontextualized, becoming a light garment that rises along with us.
Ecdysis is the visual chronicle of an inner metamorphosis: an attempt to explore and inhabit our boundaries in order to find the subtle crack through which to open them and make them permeable.
