Artistic research as a way to inhabit est-ethics.
Intuition, stripped of romanticism, as a synthesis of experience and inquiry
the un-signified that signifies.
What assumptions shape the worlds that define us? What worlds shape the assumptions that define the assumptions?
The democracy of acceptable thought legitimizes itself by shaping discourse through the stigmatization and flattening of the other. A fragile, unsustainable skeleton, softened in form and whitened by its own decay, elevates its idea to the universal. A rhetorical construct that fears its own shadow.
This work explores the increasing production of Islamophobic books in the United States and parts of Europe, where the word Islam is progressively framed as an enemy.
I aimed to expose the space where the imaginary of the other is constructed and how the dominant culture’s supposed will for intercultural dialogue often results in a self-referential discourse, structurally bound to marginalize the subaltern. In this case, Islam.
«During Ramadan, I usually return home once a year, and my 11-year-old daughter Rahma always waits for me to bring her clothes from Europe. She loves them. They are her gift for Eid, the celebration of children.»
This work stems from a simple question I encountered years ago during one of my first encounters with the Islamic culture of rural Algeria:
Can the construction of the Islamic ideal of beauty survive the impact of modern civilization?
«I call Brahim. He tells me that yesterday, at the police headquarters in Nador, they questioned him about everything: the project, our connection, his friends, family, phone numbers, social networks, political and religious beliefs.
What began as a routine immigration check turned into ideological profiling. Brahim is scared. He’ll likely abandon the project for his safety.
Morocco seems welcoming—and it is, for tourists. But during my pre-project trip, I saw a country under strong social control, where anything outside the norm—unmarried couples sharing space, drinking a beer, skipping Ramadan—happens clandestinely.
When they took him away, my blood boiled. There’s nothing to accuse him of—can swimming toward a boat really be criminal suspicion? Yet, intelligence moved fast, interrogating and investigating.
It feels like people understand each other, but the structures meant to govern often don’t. As Gabriele said, maybe it’s just the banality of evil.»
Gracias por su visita began with disorientation. Lincoln, Argentina, is built on a grid—simple yet labyrinthine for an outsider. My journey started with getting lost.
What struck me first was the deep-rooted Italian presence. Almost everyone had Italian ancestry. White, not Mapuche or Guaraní, yet all offered me mate. My first short circuit.
Social life was slow. Without project-sponsored connections, I navigated relationships independently. Lincoln doesn’t wait for you. You begin as a stranger—and I embraced it.
Then I met Antonio, the Braille teacher. He wrote Gracias por su visita on a blank sheet and gifted it to me. Our conversations revealed how sensory segregation shapes social worlds, even within welcoming communities.
Lincoln’s divisions became clearer. In the city’s margins stands an elite private school, disconnected from its surroundings. Children from poorer neighborhoods attend central public schools but remain bound to their barrios. Which of these is Lincoln?
The city’s history echoed through its present. Built on conquest, its name celebrates generals and forts. Today, spatial and social segregation mirrors that colonial past, while tourism emerges as an economic solution, promising growth while commodifying human connection.
That’s when the idea struck: Turismo Braille, a fictional tourist agency offering an alternative map of the city, guided by the blind community. It aimed to challenge spatial hierarchies and expose the exclusion embedded in tourism-driven narratives.
The project had three objectives:
Through media, social networks, and workshops, the project sparked dialogue but faced institutional resistance, halting its continuation. This led to a second approach: the First Self-Reflective Monument of Lincoln.
Collaborating with locals—elders, children, the Braille community—we covered 600 plaster eggs at the foot of the national flag. As the plaster solidified, it concealed the eggs, symbolizing how institutional narratives erase marginalized histories, like the absence of Indigenous and Black identities in Lincoln’s self-image.
Alongside the monument, Publicidad Rodante brought central commercial announcements to peripheral neighborhoods, reversing the usual flow of visibility.
Ultimately, the project didn’t seek closure but dialogue—between the “central periphery” and the “peripheral periphery.” As the question printed on our paper souvenirs asked:
«If humans come from apes, do Argentinians come from ships?»
On the reverse side, another provocation:
«Tourism will save us all.»
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A latent mental space, a space that has transformed post-uterine life into a uterocentric society.
The uterus as a space of need, an ideal where the satisfaction of one’s dependency is demanded. The double distance once called relationship dissolves into a co-asymmetric and physiologically static gap, established a priori by the parties. Each one silently devoted to the metric of the object, each one defined by its permanent state of need, endlessly seeking a space of acceptance that remains unattainable within this very condition.
The post-relational, the incompatible idea of the placenta, represents that segment folded inward, yet not the interior, but the isolated individual, the unbound self. Isolated individuals, unbound individuals: a multitude shaped by structuring need, a structuring multitude born from structured need. A succession of segments forming the spiral of the other’s negation. Violence.
A mental space, the axiom upon which the representation of corporeal space is built. The origin of the automated freedom of beauty, movement, and the devouring consumption of the other.
Non-fiction / 17 min / 2018
Directed by Gabrele Dipas and Clara Puente
Original Language: Portuguese
Subtitles: Spanish
Music: Untitled, Gabrele Dipas
Production: Instituto Terra e Memória de Mação
Talvino is 76 years old, yet one of the youngest inhabitants of Santos, a small village in central Portugal. The last fires have devoured what remained from the previous ones, and soon the ashes will be covered by eucalyptus. Everything will turn green again, but no one will be there by then. Santos will have already surrendered to silence.
CIE – The Other Side of Security
Documentary / 2009–2011
Directed by Gabriele Dipas
«The best way to learn how to make a film is to make one,» Stanley Kubrick once said. I had never made one before, but I felt an urgent need to tell the story of something absurd I witnessed during a period of volunteer work in one of Italy’s most emblematic cities: Castel Volturno.
Back then, security seemed like an inverted concept. The Identification and Expulsion Centers (CIE) appeared as shadowy zones, places where rights dissolved into bureaucracy and indifference. This documentary was born out of that experience—not from a structured plan, but from the need to shed light on what remained unseen.
More than a denunciation, it is an unfiltered, close-up look at a system that blurs the lines between protection and imprisonment, order and marginalization.
© 2025 Gabrele Dipas
