Hair holds memories. It keeps time, records the passing of seasons, and becomes an instrument of devotion to dominant beauty standards, shock, struggle and revolution. But when did we become entangled? Was it a reflex? A cry for help directed towards our own kind, or an attempt to prevent someone else from escaping the tightening knot?
The artist presents an interpretation of female experience that prompts us to ask which systems we are resisting, which we are quietly enabling and who profits from these shifts.
HAIRFUCK (2025) is a video performance that examines the female body both as a sculptural object and as a site of resistance. Set within the stark architecture of a stable, the work draws on the unstable relationship between domestication, ownership and care, placing its performers in a liminal space that evokes both the animal and its keeper. Through the repeated manipulation of long hair, a familiar symbol of femininity is transformed into a material that is at once seductive, restrictive and provocative. Slow, prolonged gestures make body and hair inseparable, moving between acts of care, control, violence and desire.
Drawing on the visual language of fashion photography, internet aesthetics and performance art, HAIRFUCK uses stylised compositions and rhythmic editing to create imagery that is both seductive and unsettling. What initially appears to be an aesthetic celebration of beauty, gradually reveals itself as a ritual of entanglement, exposing the invisible systems of control embedded within ideals of femininity. By weaving complex psychological tensions into striking moving images, the artist challenges how we perceive intimacy, memory and our shared physical existence.
Vittoria’s practice is expansive, orchestrating a visceral and layered form of cinema in which raw performance collides with a meticulously constructed aesthetic. Her artistic direction, together with her ability to connect different disciplines and collaborative processes, transforms this video work into a testament to multiple art forms, technical skill and creative collaboration – an undertaking few artists are able to command with such confidence.
Vittoria is a multidisciplinary artist whose video works and installations, including HAIRFUCK, examine female autonomy and intimacy across international contexts, from London to the CICA Museum in South Korea.
She holds a degree in Law from City University and a master’s degree in Screenwriting from USC. Her narrative work ranges from screenplays selected as Sundance finalists to films screened at MAXXI and at Oscar-qualifying festivals. Her forthcoming feature film was selected for the Venice Biennale College. Vittoria also directs high-fashion editorials and advertising campaigns for Vogue, Swarovski and Harper’s BAZAAR.
Text by Silvia Laurelli