Lockdown Performances – 2021

Three performances created during lockdown: Future Optimist, Obsession and Insecure at Night

Lockdown Performances brings together three works created by Dino Desica during the COVID-19 lockdown: Future Optimist, Obsession and Insecure at Night. Made within domestic and online spaces, the works use the camera as a way of performing, communicating and attempting to connect while physical encounters were restricted.

Across the series, Dino moves between optimism, obsession, insecurity and loneliness, using the conditions of isolation as material for performance. In Insecure at Night, he enters random video-chat platforms searching for conversation, intimacy and love, encountering strangers whose expectations often differ radically from his own.

Rather than treating online space simply as a way to present performance, the trilogy explores how the screen itself became a space for encounters, exposing the vulnerability, awkwardness and unpredictability of trying to connect with others remotely.

Concept and video: Norman Mine
Performance: Dino Desica
Year: 2021
Works: Future Optimist, 5 min | Obsession, 3 min 25 sec | Insecure at Night, 7 min

The Lockdown Performances emerged from a period in which both performance and everyday social life had been forced onto screens. With theatres closed and physical encounters restricted, Dino Desica continued to perform from within the domestic environment.

Across Future Optimist, Obsession and Insecure at Night, ordinary actions, private thoughts and digital encounters become performance material. Dino shifts between optimism and anxiety, fantasy and isolation, using the camera both as a substitute audience and as a way of constructing company in the absence of others.

Rather than simply documenting lockdown, the trilogy explores the strange collapse of private and public life that occurred during it. The home becomes stage, dressing room and set; the phone becomes camera, audience and connection to an inaccessible outside world.

Seen together, the three works capture Dino at a moment when his persistent need to perform collides with enforced isolation. They ask what remains of a performer when there is nowhere to go, nobody physically present to watch, and yet an ongoing desire to be visible.

Works
Future Optimist, 2021 · 5 min
Obsession, 2021 · 3:25 min
Insecure at Night, 2021 · 7 min

Performance: Dino Desica
Video / Edit: Norman Mine