Being the most popular social network for minors and children, TikTok is also the one with the most aggressive censorship among all the various platforms, especially when it comes to body exposure. Users often end up with their content deleted or accounts banned without a clear explanation. More often, the expression “fake body” is present in the captions of the videos: this does not indicate that a fake body is shown, but it is a way to bypass TikTok’s censorship rules, or at least this is what users tell themselves.
I started collecting hundreds of dancing videos of any kind, intrigued by this fake-body-thing, getting more and more mesmerized by the same repetitive movements performed by different users. This has become the ground I worked on for a few months, somehow peeking through unknown people's lives. Bedrooms, but also kitchens, gardens, living rooms, courtyards and swimming pools, were the sets of these mis-en-scène where the users are in sync with each other, reiterating the same movements in a standardized, recognizable pattern.
The project Fake Bodies is a collection of long exposure pictures of those videos looping on my computer's monitor.
Through this process movements, shapes, outlines and even identities are lost in a colorful blur, only the surroundings being still clearly visible. The real body is transformed into a fake one, dematerialising before the camera's gaze, as if censored by the same algorithm the users were trying to fool.
