Esposizione in tempo reale n. 6 - Il mendicante elettronico (1), 1973

Franco Vaccari’s Esposizioni in tempo reale (Exhibitions in Real Time) is the central axis of his research, around which his art has developed—a series of works and exhibitions that take shape in public, with the artist involving people in his creative process and feeding off their reactions much more than his esthetic choices. One of Vaccari’s fundamental intuitions in this openness to expressive possibilities is his frequent use of technological languages, such as photography and video, which, until then, he had always found to be mechanisms of power more than of participation.

Photography, which emerged along with the development of colonialism and ethnographic and Lombrosian theories, had focused on the masses only in order to categorize their deviancies from the code of normality. [...]