Costume Party: Beauty, Love, Fame

July 2026, Stromboli, Italy

Curated by Cornelia Mattiacci and Niccolò Gravina

For Vulcana. Sublimation, the Italian-Lebanese artistic duo Désirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti presents Costume Party: a site-specific work composed of sculptural tableaux and screens showing a new film shot on the island, signed by Nancy Delroi Collection. The scenes — blending psychological noir, period drama, and the-atrical documentation — unfold within bare interiors serving as improvised sets. Much of the work features dialogues co-written with the participants, filmed during the residency alongside the island residents. The focus is on notions of violence, dominance, and possession, triggering power plays, erot-icism, and rebellion. The work draws inspiration from Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1976), where an elite brothel is transformed into a spy hub to monitor clients’ loyal-ty, turning a space of pleasure into a surveillance machine. What appears as entertainment reveals itself as a system of recording, exposure, and potential blackmail. The piece also references Maryam Jafri’s Costume Party (2005), where historical disguises and the tableau structure deconstruct the mechanisms of ideological manipulation and social control. Navigating complicity and friction, adherence and sabotage, Costume Party builds toward a climax, moving from the interior of the house to the cry of the volcano.

Text by Niccolò Gravina