Welcome to the Dollhouse
Text JF. Pierets Artwork Beatrice Morabito
What do Barbie’s friends do behind closed doors? Apparently, someone knows, and it’s pretty kinky. Beatrice Morabito is an Italian female artist, living and working in Genoa, Italy. She is known for creating sets for dolls she has styled to act as her current alter-ego.
Morabito considers her doll pictures being a secret diary, based on a language of images and not words. “They are a reflection of my feelings, dreams and my life events, I do freeze frame them in a picture but instead of locking them up, I expose them.
It’s a hard task to communicate feelings with a doll, but I love the challenge: A doll can not move by itself, cannot smile, cry, change the position of her body, the expression of the face and so on. What you capture in your picture is what you forced them to express.
It is you doing all these things in her place, so she can simply be an object depicting an extension of myself.”
The artist quotes Freud’s belief that if you scratch the surface of every virtue, you will find the vice and vice versa.
“Away from concepts and away from perfection, I show a secret world where the subconscious lives and where every desire can become a reality.
‘Sometimes the dolls are my alter-ego and sometimes I am the alter-ego of the dolls.’
Sometimes the dolls are my alter-ego and sometimes I am the alter-ego of the dolls. Love, passion, sadism, masochism, sorrow, pleasure, hate, hunger, rage, regret, fetishism: they’re all part of being human.”
But it’s not just doll bondage over at Morabito’s. Some dolls look ready for the runway. Strutting their stuff in haute couture dresses. Feminine but creepy, Oyster Dreams is kind of like Cindy Sherman’s doll pieces, only way more glamorous and kinky.
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