Cristina De Middel – Poly Spam

February 23, 2012 · by oitzarisme · in xLegacy

Any given monday a fifty year old woman who´s about to enter the operating room for an open-heart surgery, decides to write me begging for help. She needs urgently someone to administer her huge fortune and share it out amongst different NGOs. A few hours later a young girl tries to persuade me to marry her in order to get at last the great inheritance her parents left her with the only condition of not being single at the age of 30. On tuesday, an african attorney has chosen me to share the funds of a left over account he´s found and at the same time I´m informed that I just won the Brittish Lottery and a brand new Toyota.

All of them have been entering my INBOX for the last year, telling me incredible stories they describe with all the details I need to realise that their situation is definitely dramatic and that they truly need my help. By trying to awake both my mercy and my greed., they offer me the perfect businness: cleaning my conscience and my financial situation at the time.

The internet became long ago a machine out of control that has mainly lost all his consistency and any medium-experienced internaut is aware of the scam hidden in these unique opportunities. We came at the point in which these terrible stories told are not even worth the time it takes to read them and they are directly deleted in what could be considered a crime against humanity at a domestic level.

With this project I recover these stories and read them carefully, analyzing the scheme of the trap that is hidden in its structure and that offers a list of our complexes and sins as social beings. These stories are designed to make us feel chosen as one in a million: at last, lady luck knocking at our door after all this effort in vain.

Starting from this deliciously written lie, the series “Poly-Spam” aims to build the robotic portrait of the senders, taking every single detail specified and translating it into images with special care in the dramatic ambient of the specific momment in which the mail was sent.

By using photography and its veracity load, I certify the existence of something to good to be true, I create impossible documents based on pure lies. I put a face behind the tale, but a contemporary one, a tale adapted to the dreams and frustrations of modern times.