Stefano De Luigi, Televisiva, 2025

TELEVISIVA by Stefano De Luigi is a compelling visual investigation of Italian television culture during the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, spanning from 1994 to 2008. Shot entirely in black and white, the work peels away the glossy surface of the screen to expose the deep cultural and political transformations that occurred behind it. Through striking images from TV studios, game shows, variety sets, and audiences, De Luigi reveals a surreal theatre where entertainment, performance, and ideology merge.

This is not a nostalgic look at television’s past. It is a critical reflection on how media became a mechanism of influence and control. De Luigi’s photographs capture the exaggerated gestures, artificial smiles, and ritualized codes that redefined civic life into spectacle. Television became not only a mirror of society but a tool for shaping its desires, fears, and beliefs. Hosts and contestants appear as actors in a tightly choreographed system of distraction, where culture is flattened into entertainment and public discourse becomes performance.

TELEVISIVA is not just a document of Italy. It anticipates global patterns that would emerge years later. The mechanisms seen here — populism as performance, media as power, entertainment as politics — foreshadow similar phenomena across the world, where spectacle and ideology intertwine to shape public opinion. Italy in this sense was not an exception but a harbinger.

Through visual precision and cultural insight, TELEVISIVA exposes how television redefined identity, blurred truth, and laid the foundation for today’s media-saturated, post-truth world. De Luigi compels us to reconsider what we watch and what watching has done to us.