Pornoland Redux is the story of returning from a land where battles are fought and epic feats are accomplished, a place everyone talks about and that everyone would at least like to visit. The borders of Pornoland may be broad and hazy – Berlin, Dortmund, Budapest, Prague, Tokyo, Los Angeles – yet the geographical venue is not one defined by ‘facts’: it is essentially a representation of oneiric fantasies, dreamy hallucinations, details and obsessions, all even more real than reality itself.

Stefano De Luigi – on tiptoe, edging around the film set almost like a shadow – rewrites the dynamics of an imaginary world now crystallised in a long but well-defined series of situations, caught on the cusp between the banality of everyday life and the climax of the heroic moment. The hero does not have a perpetually erect penis, brandished like a gladius, ready to plunge into the body of his predestined victim – here we might see him instead amicably whispering a few words into his partner’s ear. The group of males in their underwear on a spotlighted stage is reminiscent of any group of workers waiting to carry out some strenuous task. Nor are there any heroines, except for a statue of Athena – a warrior virgin, clasping her spear – indignantly surveying the intercourse taking place. An inflatable doll and a set of clothes to wear suggest a comic rendition of the ritual of dressing in armour.

The pornographic image is always evoked but never displayed. In a room reminiscent of a living room, a naked man is holding his penis. To the right of the photograph, a woman observes the scene. Her backlit body is dark, in contrast with the warm yellow light that envelops the room. The man’s gesture is intimate; he does not think anyone is watching him. The woman, on the other hand, observes without being seen. She waits. Waiting for what? we might ask. For him to be ready to start the shoot.

The photographs do not describe or even tell, but rather they elude, or more often allude. There are no polished bodies shifting between Edenic paradises or luxurious Californian residences filled with mirrors and deep blue pools. None of Bosch’s delights appear here. What the images contain and signify is deliberately postponed, almost as if the function of these photos were to protect the bodies of the actors in space, to put off their actions in time. The photographer’s gaze often lingers on what does not appear, on what one does not expect to see.

It is the image of a time in which nothing happens. A time of waiting, of suspension, of emptiness. A time between brackets, between one scene and another, akin to that which is marginal, to something that is not usually seen. De Luigi likes to broaden the boundaries of the reality he observes, both in a spatial sense (since there is always ‘another’ space alongside that which may be seen) and in a temporal sense (since he avoids the quantitative conception of time and its viewing in terms of its pure effectiveness). This is why he photographs time devoid of any value: three women chat among themselves in a room with a meeting table, perhaps waiting for an interview; an actress, lying on a bed, covers her body with a large cloth that she pulls over her face and with which she seems to be wiping her mouth; an actress is given some paper on a roll by a man, most likely to clean her body of organic residues after shooting a scene.