PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLAUDIO CASSANO
"Can fetish be incorporated into our daily lives, help us to overcome the tensions, meet our needs, and thus be accepted by our contemporary society?"
Fetish evokes a desperate attraction and a burning desire for something tangible: a situation, an object or a gesture that helps to meet the deepest emotional needs. Daily Fetish is a project by Benedetta Martino for Central St. Martins in London, MA in Material Futures and visually realized in collaboration with artist Claudio Cassano.
After extensive research into the infinite variations of the fetish world, some of the best known practices were selected and observed: the Japanese art of Shibari, the fetishism of latex, and the concept of submission and domination applied in Spanking.
The essence of these elements was distilled through a metaphor of the human body and applied parallel to three types of meat used in Great Britain: Pork, Sausage, and Chicken.
The goal is to show how the satisfaction, not only of exclusively sexual origins, can be reached through gestures and actions of a fetish nature. This project wants to be understand how the potential of fetish can help in the conduct of everyday life and specifically through daily acts such as cooking.
Documenting this universe with real people in the act of their practices, through photos and videos, shows how fetish has the potential to help escape the stresses of everyday life in the moment in which it is practised. The method is to provoke, visually and directly showing the viewer a "world" outside the social rules, a different world where the escape from modern stress can be easily achieved through fetish.