Marcello Mercado

Bitte Abstand halten / Please keep distance
25 × 20 cm, 240 pages
2015

 

Bitte Abstand halten / Please keep distance (2015) is a photographic book structured around a paradoxical form of self-representation: a body that appears only through its reflections, traces and mediations. Mercado constructs a visual field populated by transparent objects, containers, membranes and interfaces that register proximity while enforcing separation. The body is everywhere implied and nowhere present.

Rather than staging the figure, the work assembles a regime of signals—warnings, controls, barriers, instructions—that articulate contemporary modes of distance, regulation and visibility. Glass, plastic and reflective surfaces operate as both image carriers and distancing devices, producing a tension between intimacy and prohibition.

The book unfolds as a quiet archive of thresholds. What is documented is not the body itself, but the infrastructures that surround it: optical, technical and behavioral systems that define how bodies are allowed to appear, circulate or withdraw. In this sense, Bitte Abstand halten / Please keep distance reads less as a photographic narrative than as a material protocol—one in which absence becomes the primary form of inscription.