Marcello Mercado

Confinment

Artist´s book, 82 pages

2020

 

Confinement

Produced during the global lockdown of 2020, Confinement forms part of Marcello Mercado’s long-term investigation into the image as an operational system—where perception, technology, and lived experience intersect. Rather than documenting an exceptional moment, the book registers a condition: the reconfiguration of domestic space under prolonged isolation.

The photographs, captured with night-vision devices, depict ordinary interiors and objects—chairs, curtains, televisions, food, the silent presence of animals—rendered unfamiliar through a technology historically associated with surveillance and control. This choice displaces the domestic from the realm of intimacy toward that of exposure, transforming private space into a monitored environment and the everyday into a field of latent tension.

Throughout Mercado’s practice, the image functions less as representation than as a recording apparatus shaped by technical mediation. In Confinement, night vision does not illuminate; it abstracts. It produces a perceptual distance that mirrors the psychological dislocation of isolation, where time dilates and the boundary between interior and exterior collapses. The book thus operates as both a personal archive and a diagram of collective experience.

Confinement extends Mercado’s ongoing engagement with archival systems, surveillance technologies, and the fragility of bodily presence under conditions of constraint. The work resists narrative closure, offering instead a sequence of visual residues—images that neither explain nor dramatize, but persist as evidence of a suspended state.

In this sense, the book does not document confinement as an event, but as a structural condition: a spatial, temporal, and perceptual enclosure in which visibility itself becomes unstable.